azeem.azhar

The Kindle finally arrived. Message: a great first try but needs rapid iteration.

Unboxing

• I am used to Apple products. Found the Kindle’s box cheap and the unboxing process far from that of any Apple product. However, far better than the typical piece of consumer electronics (e.g. Blackberry)

Physical feel

• Feels futuristic. It is really light. But is feels solid. Very clever
• However, key pushes feel really tacky. I have to push harder than I would like. I don’t get the solid feedback of a genuine keyboard, nor the instance, velvet response of a touchscreen.
• The keys (especially next page, previous page) need quite a push and are joined by a horrid cheap clicking sound.
• The ‘full keyboard’ on the Amazon Kindle is fiddly.

Reading

• The device is light so holding it is a easy.
• However, the contrast ratio on the E-ink screen is really really poor. It is like reading an old, old book with battered pages.
• To move to a new page, you need to click (quite hard), get that tacky clicking sound, and then the screen flashes (I assume to reset the eink). That hold process is f-ugly. Distracting and unpleasurable.
• The screen options available do not suit my style of electronic reading. I am a very fast reader and when I read only I like to have well-spaced lines with a few words on each line and scan extremely quickly. (Sort of modified rapid serial visual presentation). I also don’t like the limited choice of fonts, vastly preferring modern sans serif.

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Popularity: 32% [?]

Shoshana Zuboff was the first who likened Wall St/the City’s past five years as crime against humanity:

By now the existential security of millions of people has been threatened or destroyed. No one is safe from the waves of value destruction set into motion by the banal evil of this self-centered business model and the unquestioning participants who failed to assert their own moral judgment. The urgent lesson for capitalism’s heirs redounds through every headline: There is no “other”; there is only us. The damage that was supposed to be “theirs” is now shared misery on a global scale.

But I question whether she went far enough. The economic cost of the credit unwinding will have real, and ultimately measurable effects, in the quality of life for vast numbers of people. More than that: it will have measurable effects in the life or not of large numbers of people.

How so?

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Popularity: 8% [?]

From The Economist:

Danone, a French food group, has created a line of low-cost yogurts in Europe, called “€co Packs”, that come in smaller tubs and fewer flavours than its standard products.

The smaller-pack size in its ultimate form is the single-serve revolution that CK talked about a few years ago.

But research into BOP consumers suggests that they want larger packs and more choice (I need to dig out the reference). The irony is not lost here. We’ve realised that as soon as credit tightens have a huge, half-disposable serving doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, our tastemakers in the form of mass media and village scuttlebutt is radically behind the scenes.

Some part of our message to the BOP is now: ‘Be less like us, be more like you.’

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tucked away in this week’s Economist was a great summary of the underlying causes of current crisis. Most saliently:

Nevertheless, the current crisis suggests that monetary and fiscal policy cannot be driven exclusively by economic fundamentals such as inflation and unemployment. When interest rates are low, consumers and businesses do not just borrow money; they borrow money to buy assets, setting up a feedback loop that can eventually lead to a bubble. When such a bubble is inflating, government revenues (in the form of taxes on capital gains, bonuses, corporate profits and property sales) tend to be strong. As governments are now discovering, such revenues collapse very quickly when the bubble bursts.

The critical mistake by Governments is to mistake the health of the financial sector (and the booming tax revenues) with the sign of underlying strength in the economy, rather than the earliest warning sign that things are getting overheated. In other words, monetary policy should tighten earlier and with more affirmation, which in turn means that economy-wide changes needs to, somehow, take effect more gradually.

And as Frydman and Goldberg argue banks need to increase there defences ‘during excessive upswings in asset prices so that they are able to weather the inevitable reversals’.
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Popularity: 2% [?]

I was two parts astonished and one part unsurprised to discover that Google was going to get into corporate venturing.

The traditional case for corporate venturing–which is often based on solid academe (e.g. Block, Chesborough, Birkenshaw, Dushnitsky) goes like this:

• Not all the smart people live inside our company. There are tons of smarts outside our company and venturing or minority-investing will help us access this
• We can leverage our balance sheet without hurting earnings by taking small stakes in emerging companies
• As an quoted, operating company we can’t take the risks or afford the uncertainty that new ventures targeting new customer segments or using new technology create.
• Venturing is a cheap way for us to get a good sense of the dealflow in the market
• It won’t cost anything—even if we fail over several years, we’ll only have a writedown of a few hundred million dollars which in the scale of our company is nothing. And who knows, we might pick the next Facebook, er, Google, and then we’ll look really smart
• We need a full armory of innovation tools to ensure we continue to innovate. That armory includes innovation programmes, brain storms, partnerships, McKinsey, BCG, etc, etc and—of course—a venture program.
• The academic studies do support corporate venturing as a driver of value-add (as measured by Tobin’s Q)

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Popularity: 18% [?]