The Balancing Rock

A note on tech companies.

I had a very interesting conversation on Twitter with friends of mine from one of South Africa’s fastest growing and exciting new media companies. Altivex Foundry specialises in digital media work and they have a team that has a very impressive track record and these boys sure do know their stuff!

Back to the conversation, we were talking about what it takes for tech companies to stay ahead of the game but not lose the ‘soul’ of the company. I have very strong views about this subject and all most all of them come back to stuff that Apple / Steve Jobs et al have done. So I’ll try and explain (from my PERSONAL point of view, anyway) what I think it takes.

‘Every pirate wants to be an admiral.’ Cory Doctorow

What’s wrong with this picture?

Source: BBC / ITU / TeleGeography

The image above is a snapshot of a map of the world’s network of undersea cables (those cables that connect you to the world wide web kids). The dark blue bits are the most connected areas while the light blue bits….well you get the picture.

Guess where there’s the least connectivity? Hit the source link to see the full interactive map.

SOURCE

The problem with the internet.

SOPA. PIPA. DMCA. DEA.

To the masses in that outland that is the internet, these acronyms represent a lot more than just a few words thrown together to prevent one’s mouth stumbling over their constituent parts. These are of course acronyms for a series of legislative attempts to reign in what western governments and the media industry have now begun to call ‘the problem with the internet’. Laws that in the minds of the men and women who stand on the soap box on their behalf, will represent the great vengeance and fury that will be visited upon he who distributes pirated material on the internet or engages in an act that can be deemed contrary to the rights of copyright owners. Of course we know that the internet is a far more stubborn child who throws a tantrum of biblical proportions in the face of a potential spanking by a bunch of people in suits with clipboards.

I love my Blackberry, I hate my Blackberry.

I have a Blackberry. A Pearl 9105 to be exact. In the grand scheme of things it is said to be a smartphone which combines svelte, compact looks with a powerful operating system that relies on the world’s most innovative internet service; the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS). Ah, that word ‘svelte’. It is the marketing men’s way of telling us consumerist mere mortals that what you’re buying is the packaged equivalent of Gisele Bündchen.

Notes on an OS

I have gone to great lengths in the last few weeks to get my wife to appreciate the life changing effect of using a Mac over a PC. So far I can report that this is a work in progress. Not because my wife is not very switched on, to the contrary she is far cleverer than me (and better looking if I may say so). No that’s not the reason.

i’m New here

So I now have a blog. A space on the internet to express my opinions and hopefully knock some ‘stuff’ together. Just exactly what that ‘stuff’ will be is still a bit of a conundrum to me as my head feels like an absolute jumble sale at times.