Bill Wyman and Michael Jackson, the Pale King

On the eve of his most awesome final tour, we were all shocked with the way the King of Pop slipped away from us in the night. A good friend gave me a hard copy of Bill Wyman's powerful summary of Jackson's rise and fall. That means something because these days it's rare thing to receive more than a link from someone sharing content.

Wyman links Jackson's music with our struggle as Americans to get along and to fit in-- and how the King of Pop both dealt with and represented that struggle. If Jackson's life impacted yours at all, it's available at The New Yorker's website and well worth the read.

The Pale King: Michael Jackson's ambiguous legacy.

You on Woo Woo?!

Adobe's recent ad is hilarious.


It does a great job of satirizing the marketing panic that occurs when conventional and digital product owners chase the always shifting online populace, but it also does something else-- it supports Bevel creator Tristan Walker's recent statement that the African American "community is the most culturally influential demographic in the world."

When the corporate leader declares "we need an ethnically ambiguous Woo Woo mascot!" he does so as an acknowledgement that he wants to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

While it's just a silly commercial, in this regard, it unfortunately mirrors all too well some of the places I've worked at. It begs the question-- Why not appeal to the same wide audience when it comes to hiring practices? Build a team that represents your target demo rather than picking up a tip while eaves-dropping on an elevator conversation or acting on unverifyable outside data. Bringing together diverse opinions nad life experience also allows companies to act on a key piece of advice from the most powerful corporate entity in the world: "[to]build the products that [they] want to use [them]selves."

It's not easy, but it's often worth it. Diversity of social class, of sexual orientation, culture,race, etc. could expose valuable opportunities that your competitors, stuck in the mud of 'sameness' could pass by.

Think about it.

"The Community Deserves Better"

Tristan Walker on Bevel:

"When you consider that the community is the most culturally influential demographic in the world, the community just deserves better."

Bevel is the first brand out of Walker & Company. It's a shaving system designed to allow men of colour-- men with curlier, coarser hair, to be able to shave without suffering from razor bumps and other issues associated with products made primarily to serve other hair and skin types.

Walker formerly lead business development at Foursquare. From tech to grooming? Weird right? Not when you consider that his Bevel brand  is a technology hardware company that solves a problem for about 20 million people in the US with a combination of durable and consumable goods.  Now that's a solid user-base-- especially at around Father's Day or Christmas Time.

The company philosophy is focused on building brands that solve problems like razor burn, vitamin D deficiency, hyper-pigmentation, and the age-old problem of natural-hair transitioning.

We look forward to it.

Elon Musk De-Escalates the Patent Wars

I don't think of Elon Musk as Iron Man.*

I do, however, believe he's a hero for geeks everywhere. In the spirit of All Your Base Are Belong To Us, he's announced that Tesla's patents will be made available in an effort to get other EV organizations... on a roll so to speak.

It's understanding the difference between a patent and quality engineering. And it's great.

All Our Patent Are Belong to You


*Iron Man's got daddy issues and designs weapons of mass destruction from his basement.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 Looks Quite Compelling.

Engadet ran a story for the recently announce Surface Pro 3 tablet from MS. The following quote shows the compelling nature of the new device:

In addition to being thin, the Surface Pro 3 is relatively lightweight, at 800g (1.76 pounds). And let's be clear: When we say "relatively," we mean compared to a 12-inch laptop, or even a 13-inch Ultrabook; those would weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of three pounds. Even the 11-inch MacBook Air comes in at 2.4 pounds. Of course, the Surface Pro 3 is still heavy next to an iPad Air or Samsung Galaxy Tab. But the Surface Pro was never supposed to compete with those kinds of tablets anyway. No, this is, and always was, a laptop killer.

(emphasis added)

The idea that this device can run all of your Windows apps, gives the user access to the file system and is lighter than a Macbook Air 11 has a 12" screen is pretty impressive. What does 1.76lbs feel like? Probably like an iPad 3/3rd Generation (1.44lb) with a case around it.

Here's the video.

How the EU wants Google to Edit "Irrelevant" History

Google, the EU and history.

Today the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that if someone searches your name, and the results that show up list information that you don’t care to be remembered, you can request that the search engine company posting those results, remove those links or otherwise remove the data.

The Ruling that could change the face of the Web

The Court ruled this way using the principle of “right to be forgotten.” RTBF, as we’ll call it, means that when it comes to search engine results about individual people (in this case, EU citizens), those people now have the ability to request that certain bits of information about their lives be removed since they believe those results are no longer relevant.

How did we get here?
The BBC has an in-depth recount but here's the gist: Sixteen years ago a Spaniard fell into some debt. In order to get out from under the burden, an auction was put on for one of his properties. A local newspaper wrote a story about the affair and, in the course of the last decade-and-a-half, all of that publication’s information ended up on the Web. When you search for the Spaniard’s name, information about the sale of his property to pay his debts appears prominently on Google’s results page.

The Spaniard is not happy about this. He took Google to court in the EU stating that these facts from sixteen years ago were getting in the way of his reputation, which in turn, affected his ability to do business. The high court agreed by saying:

So far as concerns, next, the extent of the responsibility of the operator of the search engine, the Court holds that the operator is, in certain circumstances, obliged to remove links to web pages that are published by third parties and contain information relating to a person from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of that person’s name. The Court makes it clear that such an obligation may also exist in a case where that name or information is not erased beforehand or simultaneously from those web pages, and even, as the case may be, when its publication in itself on those pages is lawful.

Even if the web page that holds the information that the person doesn't want made available to the world has put that information up legally, the person in question can effectively stop any other person from finding the information by removing it from a search engine.

The Problem with removing Search Engine Results

The Internet, and the World Wide Web you’re using to read this post, is almost incomprehensible without the utility of a search engine. Articles, pages and documents strafe across the Internet like stars across the night sky and without a search engine as your sexton, there’s very little chance anyone can navigate it effectively.

The implications are vast. In the last few weeks search engines like Google have been accessed by millions of people to understand the controversy surrounding the Los Angeles Clippers and Donald Sterling. The team’s never won a championship but, now based on the controversy, The LA Clippers are trending higher than any other basketball team currently searched for on Google. It moved up 17 spots in the last month.

Take a quick look at the info beside each team. Three of these four have been top ten searched terms for over 100 months. The Clippers, the number one searched team, has been in the top ten for a lot less time.

But Google’s not alone. Under the EU ruling, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would all be considered search engines and would all have to remove links to content if someone like Mr. Sterling (or his considerable legal team) were to approach them and say that he believed the information was irrelevant or hurtful to his reputation so that Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would all have to remove it.

• If your friend told you to search for Sterling’s quotes on Google the information wouldn’t be there
• If your friend sent you a link via Twitter or Facebook, those sites would have to remove the link.
• If your friend had a video of someone like Sterling or Cliven Bundy on YouTube, the video service would have to remove any search links, they’d also have to remove the actual video.

Since Sterling has long owned the LA Clippers, the EU might find that he falls into what they referred to as a Public Figure, so perhaps this data would remain. But Cliven Bundy wasn’t a public figure until very recently, which means that he may have requested that YouTube take down this video and others like it on grounds that he found it irrelevant. And if they hadn't he could have sued because the following video could have hurt his reputation.

Any way you slice it, recent scandals, controversies and revelations may have all been hidden from public view if these characters had this new protection in place and argued that they were indeed private citizens.

Complying with these laws drives up costs for online businesses

Building the tools to comply with these new requirements isn't impossible, but it's certainly going to put a substantial drag on the resources of both up and coming and established tech companies. Facebook and YouTube allow users to delete posts, and they also have reasonably robust mechanisms for complaining about other people's posts whether they be offensive or infringe upon an existing copyright. 

Google's system of organizing and ranking information that it doesn't control also poses considerable challenges.

• How do they verify that the request is coming from the actual person involved?
• How do they determine if that person is a private citizen or in public life?
• How do they determine whether or not the data their linking to is irrelevant?

The Burden of managing different masters
We also need to ask how all of these guys manage the needs of the EU with those of the US and other nations? If the Spaniard requests that info be taken down, does it disappear off of Google searches from the US as well?

Twitter's in a particularly interesting situation. Like Facebook and YouTube, Twitter's a content network. Twitter's secondary role is that of a real-time search engine. The user-generated content on Twitter moves so fast and is so robust that the United States Library of Congress, as part of their chartered mission to capture "America's Story," started downloading Twitter's tweets in April of 2010 and has no intention of letting that history be destroyed.

By telling search engines and other online services to remove search results upon request, the Eu is opening the door to allowing vast amounts of data-- of history no less, to fall into obscurity; swallowed up and forever lost like the tomes of another library -- the one at Alexandria.

Similar Laws are about to go live in the US

It may be that Google and others work to adopt one standard across the world. After all, last Fall (2013) California passed an RTBF law stating that its minor population had the right request that any website they posted to had to pull down any posted content at their request. The law is designed to help youngsters get past any troubling images or opinions they may have posted whilst still in the grasp of teen angst. The unintended consequences however, begin to mirror the intentions of the recent EU ruling.

With this recent EU ruling flying in the face of Google's stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and this recent ruling flying in the face of that, there's no doubt that Google's global legal team is burning the midnight oil to up with an effective defense. After all, a little thing like this isn't going to keep Google from continuing to use the power of transparent data to change the world.

Note: A version of this article appeared on The Drill Down website on May 14th, 2014. The Podcast covered the topic in detail during episode 326

iKettle - Beautiful & Pricey. And Pricey.

Sorry-- despite the name, it's not made by Apple. Still, as a geeky gadget dude, I like when "normal" items get the connectivity/app treatment.

Some call it "the smartification of things" or the "the Internet of Things," and while it'll be the norm in a decade or so, it's pretty niche today, which often adds way too much to the price for most items.

There's no guarantee that the connectivity solutions applied to these gadgets are going to work well or even be practical, but hey-- some people like rom-coms-- devices like these are my guilty pleasure. 

With its wifi components hidden inside its stainless steel body and classically simple industrial design, the iKettle isn't just attractive, solves a particularly interesting problem for me. I very much like the idea of timing tea with breakfast from a few taps of my phone in bed, or just picking up my device and telling the kettle to get itself ready for some green or black tea (it's got settings for a couple of types.

It's back in stock. And it's tempting. The thing is, that like all of its smart, connected cousins, the iKettle should ship with two things:

1. A stated promise of firmware and other soft updates. There are a lot of things with wifi, but ha;f the promise of a connective device is that in the event of a useful innovation or security problem, a patch is on its way.
   
2. An API in addition to its app so tinkering developers can integrate it with other services. The more people tinker, the more they'll talk and integrate its functionality with other, companion products.
   
   Besides, with all these devices needing their own apps, smartphone home screens start looking like this, which is not fun.

APIs are part of the solution. Like the "macro" or activity focused line of Harmony remotes, Boulder's own Revolv does a good job of consolidating various systems into a simple interface. But that's a topic for a different entry. 

In the meantime, I'll wait for some more iKettle reviews before I plunk down $170.00 for the appliance. Even if it's not connected, one of these alongside my phone's timer app isn't exactly an awful solution.