Team effort.

Wired: Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth

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Article in Gazeta Wyborcza (Polish):

W Polsce narodzi się gigant high-tech?

A topic dear to my heart: will we at last have a high-tech startup with a brand known worldwide? Say, till 2008.

Dariusz Wiatr, former McKinsey and Andersen Consulting partner, says no.

Tomasz Czechowicz, who runs MCI Management fund, says yes (but means whole region rather than only Poland).

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BBC quotes Nobuyuki Idei, chief corporate adviser of Sony, commenting on the first foreign CEO, Sir Howard Stringer:

Mr Idei said Sir Howard had retained his Welsh sense of humour.

Japanese executives were studying how to understand his jokes, he said - “but Welsh humour is very difficult to understand.”

Poor Japanese executives.

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Either it?s my life that is getting so complicated, or it?s a natural course of things as time goes by, but every year my daily todo list and things-to-remember list is getting longer and longer.

Of this long list of pending items ? and this probably reveals that I rather suck at prioritizing things ? I chose horse riding as the one to push this weekend (sorry, driving license, another time).

The topic was pending since my horse riding adventures in China?s Tiger Leaping Gorge, which I enjoyed a lot.

I selected the Patataj horse school near Warsaw, which was suggested by a friend, after a short selection process, which in fact involved only one contender.

Typically, getting to Patataj is easy, 35 minutes with a suburb train, and then 15 minutes walk. But not this Sunday, and not my train, which struck, but only slightly, a car on the cross roads. A car struck slightly by a train looks like this:

The actual horse experience met expectations, even though I did rather poorly.

In order to make it clear to the horse how it?s supposed to go (and otherwise it is not going anywhere), one has to push it on both sides, or side after side, by the lower part of the leg, while pressing knees to the body of the horse. This involves some muscles which I apparently don?t have, so it didn?t work out very well, and I was more tired that the horse afterwards.

And as far as when to push, or when to rise from the saddle, horse riding is all about the rhythm. Adding the issue of steering the horse, in a shape of giving it signals, it?s suddenly all like dancing salsa with a partner. At least the horse is not so outspoken when you screw something.

On a positive side, though, I managed to make the horse go trot by myself, which according to the teacher allows some hope for the future.

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(Bartolomeo you are mortgaging? - a new Italian-English phrase I learned today)

In plain English, at last I received the keys to my apartment. And my mailbox. I would have received keys to the underground storage too, but the keys did not fit. Feels good anyway.

I have no idea how long will it take to make apartment suitable for living.

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I use Google Reader, which was recently upgraded. After couple of days I can say I like the update a lot. Supports selective reading much better and that’s what I needed, in order not to drown in all these feeds. But now it is probably little different to bloglines and others.. well maybe at least it’s more reliable, thanks to Google’s infrastructure.

Anyway, for those who don’t know what the RSS reader is… who yet don’t know what it is… you might want to try it.

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BenQ is a Chinese company which produces mobile phones, which are later sold under Western brands. It performed in this role quite well, but its ambitions grew and pursuing them led to BenQ’s acquiring Siemens’ mobile division. The result was rather disappointing, as reported by the Register:

BenQ’s mobile phone business - the former Siemens division BenQ took over less than a year ago for ?250m - is facing imminent collapse.

A spokesman for BenQ Mobile GmbH says the company will file for bankruptcy in the next few days as BenQ’s board has decided to discontinue funding the German unit.

Did BenQ make a false step in the right direction, or the direction itself was wrong?

To John Hagel, the final outcome gives more support to the theory that the companies are facing the great unbundling to join one of the three groups:

I have anticipated that all companies over time will unbundle into three much more focused business types ? infrastructure management businesses, product innovation and commercialization businesses and customer relationship businesses.

When I think of it, I would expect a successful Chinese outsourcer to dream about going upstream and having its own R&D and brand and all this stuff, and as a result higher value added, read: fat margins. This seems intuitive and expected by everyone but maybe wrong:

Despite enormous success in pioneering innovative business models and business practices, many entrepreneurial Chinese companies still have a sense of inferiority and want to look like larger Western companies with their own manufacturing, R&D and sales and marketing operations. The irony is that, just as many Western companies are unbundling (in part offshoring and outsourcing to more focused Chinese companies), many Chinese executives are tempted to build more tightly bundled operations that mimic the model many Western companies are abandoning.

I’m interested in the future of Chinese companies. Even though I’m skeptical about unbundling predictions, Hagel’s hypothesis provides a useful tool for exploring the topic.

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…when listening to Sigur Ros.

Famously all of the lyrics on ( ) are sung in vonlenska (also known as Hopelandic), nonsensical vocalisations which resemble the sound of the Icelandic language. It has also been said that the listener is supposed to interpret their own meanings of the lyrics which can then be written in the blank pages in the album booklet.

Genre according to Wikipedia: “post-rock”.

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So I had this unexpected visit to Wroclaw and I called Agata, a designer I cooperate with, who lives there. My call found her in an obscure corner of the Wroclaw’s Academy of Arts.

Instead of thinking about my apartment, which is in urgent need of being thought about, because the deadlines are approaching, Agata was performing Art for an exhibition a week away. I decided to pay a visit to see how the Art is performed.

On the spot it was apparent that lots of machines, and especially press, were involved in the process. “When rolling over the paper the press cannot be allowed to stop”. (read more…)

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