Apple held its “It’s only rock-n-roll” event yesterday and Steve Jobs the leader of the Apple tribe (which I wrote about in Why Community Matters a few weeks ago) was back in front of the camera and his community. In the video after the jump, Richard Waters explains why this was the most dramatic news from the company and why there remain some major unresolved questions in terms of the company’s future prospects.

Meanwhile, Chris Nuttall reviewed the video iPod nano, the “technology star of the event” and live-blogged the event over on the Tech Blog.

Continue reading "Steve Jobs is back but Apple has work to do"

An interesting branding story on how Liberty and Hermes, two classic brands, have established a partnership that maintains the right messages for each.

I wrote a few days ago on the potential pitfalls of brand association, but this seems a great idea that is innovative, creative and stylish, qualities that are all key to the bottom line for each of these companies. What’s more, this is a collaboration that seems, from the outset, to make sense. It is substantive - it’s about more than one brand slapping its logo on another - and actually suggests someone thought about what each brand can do for the other.

Two weeks ago, in a small church hall in north London, my three-year-old son picked up his Transformers lunchbox, said goodbye to a few of his friends and gave an end-of-term cuddle to the women who work at the nursery he attends four mornings a week. It was the end of term and summer holidays beckoned.

Our nursery isn’t especially fancy. The hall is a little worse for wear. The toys are not particularly new. Unlike some of the other nurseries in the neighbourhood, it doesn’t do organic food, it doesn’t have guinea pigs for the children to take care of or a vegetable patch where they can grow carrots. Come to think of it, it doesn’t have much outdoor space at all. Occasionally, the children go to the playground in a rather grim council estate nearby and I have persuaded myself that the bratty kids who once pelted me with water-filled balloons from the same playground have moved to another town.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Ok, so we don’t actually have any sort of world exclusive with anyone from Google (although today’s news that Google is releasing an operating system is, in management terms, a huge story and it would be a great time to have an interview with the company) but I borrowed the headline from the cover of the August edition of Wired UK magazine. I added the exclamation mark at the end to show just how much better our “world exclusive” is.

It’s an odd claim given that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has been interviewed a few times on FT.com, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything especially new in this piece. But any interview with the people (Wired also spoke to Sergey Brin) who are at the forefront of a technology revolution at one of the world’s most interesting companies is worth reading.

Continue reading "World exclusive interview with Google!"

John Gapper reviewed Free: The future of a radical price, the latest book by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired (US edition) in today’s paper.

And over on John’s blog, we have been engaging in our first ‘interactive review’ - opening up our pages to the author to respond and exchange ideas with the critic.

The discussion threw up some interesting ideas and, being the FT, they were discussed in a suitably civilised way.

I’m sure a lot of readers have thoughts on this so feel free to pitch in with your comments (registration is required but this isn’t too onerous).