Apple on Philip Sheldrake

Different kinds of privacy, empowerment and autonomy – centralized versus decentralized

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .]

In an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I’m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks :

Social physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition.

Pentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society?

Fancy a coffee? Social business and your non-solicitation terms

Mon, 12 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The recent antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel for collusion in hiring practices demonstrates a lack of respect for the respective organisations’ employees. Fundamentally, how dare one’s employer collude with another in ways that may limit one’s career progression!

Having been an employer carrying the not insubstantial costs of hiring I know how difficult it is to watch someone in whom you have invested considerable time, money and energy walk out the door, but I think my memory serves me well when I say we encouraged the team to celebrate such departures. If anything, our alumni network grew +1 each time.

GREAT (PR)ODUCT

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have asked six people with senior positions in techie professions who they thought “does great PR” in the tech sector. Now these individuals are not in marketing and PR functions, so you’ll forgive my casual turn of phrase I hope.

You might know I detest the idea that you might “PR something”, as if PR is as tactical and atomic as picking up the phone or putting a release on a wire, but I deliberately didn’t wish to infect them with my view of public relations excellence. I wanted to hear what they’d say unprompted, unguided.

Each proffered two or three companies. Samsung and IBM were mentioned twice. Google thrice. But out front with four mentions was Apple.

Now anyone who follows the world’s first or second largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization (it swaps places regularly with Exxon Mobil) will know that they’re actually quite a secretive bunch. Steve Jobs infected the company with the idea that it knows what’s best for the customer, and any idea that it should work with the rest of us in defining future products and services appears plain counter-cultural.

If you, like me, define public relations as pursuing mutual understanding to build goodwill , the PR function at Apple appears quite asymmetric. As and when it suits its agenda, they’ll tell you. Otherwise get back in line. End of. I always feel a reluctance on Apple’s part to discuss its contractors’ labour practices , its own environmental and business practices, and the occasional product mess up .

Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a “Human Seismograph”?

Brian Solis won’t mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It’s a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn’t quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.

And two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.

Firstly, Brian’s post “Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter ” reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine.

Apple provides media training collateral

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What better way to communicate the DOs and DON’Ts in a media training class than by example. Here’s one for your training collateral. It is an extreme case; I mean how dare anyone mention Apple iTunes and monopolistic behaviour in the same question?!

Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing is featured being interviewed by Channel 4 in the UK.

The interview is brought to a rapid close when the interviewer asks “Are you acting in a sort of monopoly way?". Schiller can’t cope with this (whoops, poor media preparation) and looks to his PRs to intercept and take him away from this bad man.