Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Not everyone – including some who arguably deserve it even more (I’m more grateful than I can say to a handful of people who have supported me through the ups and downs of the last twelve months) – gets this sort of treatment. But since I found out, before the event, which is atypical, that it’s my adored buddy’s birthday today, and given how kind, generous and, dare I say it, indispensable, Constantin Bjerke has been to me over the last year – man, it seems absurd that I’ve known Constantin for such a short time – I felt moved to once again break my rule about public congratulations to say bravo, and thank you, to a dear and cherished friend. Happy birthday, dude.
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Last night, I saw a live cast of the Met’s stellar production of Siegfried at the Hackney Picturehouse. It was broadcast in HD, as “people’s diva” Renée Fleming, who hosted the show, enjoyed reminding us between acts – though I have to say, that grainy DVD set of the Met’s 90′s Ring is perfectly good enough for me.
The production was a triumph, even though some of Fabio Luisi’s musical decisions were a little odd. (He raced through the last few dozen bars at breakneck speed, robbing the final, throbbing harmonies of much of their dramatic clout.)
But what really fascinated me was how confused the audience were about how to deal with noisy neighbours and, especially, applause. Were we in the cinema? Or ought we to have been pretending to be in the opera house? Judging by the furtive glances round the auditorium, no one seemed quite sure to begin with. But after spending the best part of six hours with this discerning metropolitan crowd, I distilled what I guess must be the accepted norms of behaviour for these events.
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Friday, 4 November 2011
I was sent this by my friends at Skimlinks as an example of the sort of swanky dos they get invited to. Though I am reliably informed that very few women (or men) who attend these parties look much like those in the image below.
To misquote Loyd Grossman, what kind of a person would be tempted by a flyer like this?
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Because the emerging technology industry is small, there’s a shortage of brilliant, opinionated writers with the wit and intelligence to make people smile, and, more importantly, think. The ones who are out there, for whatever reason, are not getting jobs. Instead, we have a glut of rather embarrassingly illiterate bloggers who, in their competitiveness for pageviews, feel pressurised into churning out rewrites of press releases and other people’s posts, occasionally over-reaching themselves to pen opinion pieces.
Start-ups have become conditioned to this cult of the mediocre, but it’s time to snap them out of it. Entrepreneurs who aspire to refashion the world around them deserve writing just as audacious and thought-provoking as their own ambitions. Unfortunately, as the technology sector in Europe has expanded, the quality of commentary around it has failed to keep up.
Depressing, isn’t it. Where are the columnists, the brave iconoclasts? The people who can make insightful links between technology and other disciplines, draw distinctions, see revealing connections? Why aren’t they being given platforms? And who is providing founders and venture capitalists themselves with a platform to share their expertise in pieces whose appeal reaches beyond the tech blogosphere? (Such an endeavour admittedly requires a patient editor. I’ve tried to do it once before, and it went down exceedingly well, but it was for a one-off project.)
Where, too, are the sketch-writers, the gossip columnists, the people writing about the people, places and events that shape the headlines? Fundamentally, people are interested in people, and we don’t hear nearly enough about the faces behind the technology that is so rapidly changing our world.
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Thursday, 3 November 2011
This week the chill wind of redundancy blew through the offices of the Independent and the Evening Standard. So far, only 20 jobs are threatened. But no one believes that the downsizing will end there. This would be a tricky problem for Independent editor Chris Blackhurst under normal circumstances. But he has also painted himself – or been painted – into a nasty corner. For, however many hacks he has to “let go”, he has promised to welcome back Johann Hari, the most comprehensively disgraced journalist in the recent history of Fleet Street. “It will be like a zombie movie – the undead Hari waddling around our corridors looking for fresh young blood,” says one source.
The fat fraudster has deposited more than one foul-smelling mess in his old newspaper’s offices. For a start, there are more revelations of his near-psychotic fantasising to emerge. What will happen, for example, if a particular African charity chooses to tell the whole story of Johann’s dangerous and histrionic hissy fits in war-torn territory?
Second, Blackhurst has to face the protests of his own journalists, who feel insulted that they have been left to clear up the aforesaid messes made by the paper’s grossly overindulged wunderkind. Just this week, star Indie columnist Julie Burchill wrote a final article for the Indie in which she referred sardonically to Hari. It was censored, of course.
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Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Violet Elizabeth Bott’s got nothing on the g2i executive who just visited a start-up CEO friend of mine in Shoreditch. I’ll leave both her and the friend unnamed, for the sake of kindness. Here’s what my friend had to say afterwards:
Today I had a visit from a g2i representative. In her introductory speech, she claimed that g2i had raised £18 million since the programme began. I immediately pulled her up on this, saying that I don’t think the companies who have spent months of meetings, presentation writing and contract negotiating would agree to that claim. I also pointed out that 50% of that money probably relates to Huddle. The Huddle guys are friends of mine and I really couldn’t imagine them handing over credit for their funding to g2i.
Seconds later, the woman pulled out a tissue and began to cry. The crying continued for the rest of the meeting. I apologised and pointed out that I was merely providing feedback, and that I value initiatives like g2i and Tech City. Who wouldn’t want help with presentations and the funding process if they were new to this type of thing? I just didn’t like the way they positioned themselves or the claims they made.
She replied: “Who are Tech City?”
I realised I was giving feedback to the wrong person and apologised again. But the crying didn’t stop.
She then pulled out a form asking for my wage bill and funding amounts. She said she also required “proof”. My funding was undisclosed at the request of the investors, although, as their anonymity is now out of the bag, I did tell her their names. But I now have to write a letter confirming the company’s wage bill with supporting evidence. I don’t want to, but, since she was crying, I promised I would.
I don’t want to largely because I am sceptical about how this information will be used. We’re currently planning a series A round which will ultimately go public. I’m interested to see how much credit they’ll want to take for that.
Like I said, I think g2i is a valuable programme and has great alumni events (for which I’m almost certainly off the invite list now!). But I think that if g2i want to make bold claims they need to use stats from people who really believe g2i was the main contributor to gaining funding.
There’s also a presentation problem. When I joined the programme, I was told it would include mentoring from the likes of Brent Hoberman and Melanie Hayes (then of 4iP). That was the main factor for me signing up, in fact.
The sessions ended up being run by companies earning a commission on finding you funding. This was still not a major issue until I got to my first mentoring session and was told that there wasn’t really much they could do to help me and that I had it all in hand.
The session lasted around 10 minutes and a week or so later I received a ‘subsidised’ mentoring invoice for £352.50. (To give some credit, the lady did point out that the consortium of companies running the programme – Quotec, Pembridge, E-synergy – have done so at a loss.)
With that, the publicly-funded princess wailed, “I’ve got a sick husband! I didn’t come here to be attacked!” and fled back to her office.
With stories like this circulating, is it any wonder curmudgeons like me are so vocally sceptical of Government-subsidised programmes?
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
I admire the Wall Street Journal Europe‘s tech blogger, Ben Rooney, for his initiative and enthusiasm, but in his naïveté and inexperience about the European technology industry he made a hopelessly and hilariously misjudged snipe about my friend Sherry Coutu’s legendary annual Silicon Valley comes to the UK in his gushing review of the F.ounders conference in Dublin.
Ben has never been invited to SVC2UK, which is perhaps why he doesn’t realise that it is, by a considerable margin, the heaviest-hitting and most impressive initiative currently operating in Europe to connect Silicon Valley elites to European founders. So I worry that Ben, whose journalistic pedigree is better than most of his peers, might be feeling pressured into sucking up to the new kid on the block at the expense of accuracy.
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Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Yesterday I proposed to a woman I do not yet know intimately, but with whom I wish to share the next chapter of my life. She accepted.
It will be an unconventional marriage, to say the least, but I am confident we will make each other very happy. I hope you will join me in celebrating soon.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
National treasure Jimmy Savile is dead. Without meaning to puncture the respectful atmosphere, given all the eulogising going on it is perhaps worth remembering that there was a dark side to this family entertainer too.
Savile, star of children’s television favourite Jim’ll Fix It, sued the Sun in 2008 over a series of articles linking him to Haut de la Garenne, the Jersey children’s home where human remains were found and children were allegedly tortured and sexually abused. He initially denied ever visiting the home, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.
In fact, Savile had close links to managers at the home. A journalist who reported on the case told me there are gruesome revelations waiting to surface that no newspaper felt able to publish at the time, given UK libel law.
And then of course there’s Savile’s reported friendship with Gary Glitter. (A case for phone hacking if ever there was one.)
Now that Savile is dead and no longer able to issue writs, how long before people start talking?
Friday, 28 October 2011
It’s not too late to nip out to the shops and pick up your Hallowe’en costume. But several readers in search of inspiration have been in touch to ask if I have any… unorthodox suggestions. Well, yes, I do. And here they are: the most terrifying things to go bump in public life in 2011…
5. MARGARET BECKETT
Nicknamed ‘Rosa Klebb’ by Private Eye and others – no doubt an appreciative nod to the good looks she shares with Bond’s 1963 nemesis – Margaret Beckett is best known for destroying British farmers’ livelihoods while at Defra, championing Labour’s insane climate change buffoonery and enjoying kooky caravaning holidays with her husband. More than egregious enough, I’m sure you’ll agree, to earn her a place in this year’s list – despite the fact that she’s now, thankfully, in Opposition.
4. JOHN BERCOW
Charlie Brooker recently used his Guardian column to call David Cameron a “lizard”. I’m guessing that’s because he doesn’t know much about politics, because John Bercow is surely a much stronger candidate for that nickname. Drenched in goo like the most frightening beast of your imagination, and with spectacularly bad taste in ties, the Speaker of the House of Commons is as loathed by his party as he is by his own wife, who only narrowly missed appearing in this list herself. This year we’re carving our jack-o’-lantern into a mock-up of the Squeaker’s slimy visage.
3. POLLY TOYNBEE
Toynbee is by a considerable margin the most hypocritical and irresponsible journalist in Britain, spewing forth dodgy stats, vitriol and class hatred from her Tuscan villa twice-weekly for the Guardian. Dead-eyed and dangerous, Polly invariably sports Joseph-style jackets stitched together with the metatarsals of young Tory researchers from bits of hazardous waste. Toynbee is impressively, almost superhumanly wrong about everything and her columns are a useful negative barometer to what’s going on in British politics.
2. CHRIS HUHNE
People of Hampshire: lock up your children! Creepy Chris Huhne, the most unpopular man in British politics, has been accused by the wife he has since left for a jackbooted lesbian called Carina Trimingham of trying to palm his speeding points off on her. The last thing you want is for Felicity and Peter to be innocently trick or treating in the neighbourhood when Mr Huhne is anxious to get home! Huhne’s also a climate change fanatic, who refuses to investigate Britain’s game-changing shale gas reserves.
1. MICHELLE OBAMA
America’s First Lady has never quite shrugged off the humiliation of being compared to Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s psychotic, scheming temptress, by my mate James Delingpole – particularly since it came so early into her husband’s presidency. As for that famously natty dress sense? Hmm. Don’t see it myself. As she gets more relaxed in front of the cameras, Mrs Obama is starting to let her personality shine through, as this recent picture shows.
Friday, 28 October 2011
Originally posted at Blottr. Read it there.
As of yesterday, we know that Amy Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning. Astonishingly, it seems to have been the only substance present in large enough quantities in her bloodstream to finish her off. Robert Le Fevre, celebrity addiction specialist, took to the airwaves late last night to dissuade us from remembering Amy Winehouse for her troubled end, praising instead “that voice… what a voice”. But he is wrong.
It’s important first to put Winehouse’s talent into perspective. She was a gifted vocalist, yes, but an interpreter of the human condition on the level of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday or Nina Simone she was not. For one thing, she didn’t have enough common ground with normal human psychology. She then squandered what gifts she had by embarking on a selfish and reckless lifestyle, condemning herself and her intimates to a toxic downward spiral of dependence and misery from which she eventually found herself incapable of escaping.
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Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Regular readers will know that I leave serious reporting to the likes of Tim Bradshaw at the FT and the inimitable Mike Butcher. Love those guys. But frankly, for me, slavishly reporting on funding rounds and acquisitions and paying obeisance to the cult of UKTI is just too fucking tedious.
So I like to write about what’s going on around the edges of the technology scene in Europe: the people, places, events and ideas that are behind the dry reportage and which silently shape the headlines.
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Wednesday, 26 October 2011
I have something I need to share with my readers. Even my mother is not aware of this, and I’m sorry she had to find out this way. You see, I’ve been holding it in for way too long and I desperately need to let it out. So here it is. This year, I was not on the press list for F.ounders in Dublin.
I was going to write a post about how unhelpful it is to be drawing a velvet rope around some of the most influential people in the industry. But, truthfully, it isn’t: it’s brilliant, and the inaugural F.ounders was one of the best events I’d been to all year. Indeed, I said so on the three occasions I wrote about it in the Telegraph.
Wait, sorry, no. Four times.
And I was tempted to write an outraged piece about how classless and ungrateful it was for a conference I’d put together a UK guest list for, made numerous introductions on behalf of, spent two and a half days of valuable consulting time giving strategic advice to and endlessly plugging, to cut me off because I’d decided to go freelance and they couldn’t boast about a specific publication next to my name on their guest list. (At least I know not to waste my New York Times commission this month on a conference review.)
But I won’t do that. I’ll simply say this. It was a shame they knowingly misled me, failing to correct my excitement and anticipation after they knew I’d booked my flights to Dublin and stringing me along for months discussing with me whom I might interview on stage, before abruptly sending me a generic email explaining that “demand had been extremely high”. Guys, I know: I’m part of the reason.
While I wish them all the best for the future, I don’t much feel like attending another F.ounders or Dublin Web Summit event right now, and I won’t for the time being feel able to vouch for those events or any of the people behind them.
I’m sure Paddy and the team will pull off another great weekend. Though, having seen this year’s guest list, which is a mixture of impressive Americans and… well, Europe’s quite small isn’t it? I hope they find someone new to help them separate the European wheat from the chaff. Because the real character of this conference is still very much in flux, and you have to wonder what the value is for the Silicon Valley guests.
For a drink-soaked hack, it’s a brilliant boondoggle, but what, besides a hangover, are people really getting for the three days away from their companies that we don’t already from DLD and Founders’ Forum? My concern is that unless F.ounders filters more effectively and consistently, this event will become just another utterly missable European schmoozefest for US CEOs with something to flog over here.
Then again, maybe not inviting me was their first step on that process…
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Johann Hari has disappeared. No, I don’t mean that he’s cowering in Elton John’s arboretum (though he may well be). I mean that he has been removed from the Independent‘s Pink List of the 100 most influential British gays. Given that (a) Hari is an Independent journalist and (b) he rocketed up to number 16 last year, this confirms his spectacular fall from grace.
To be more specific, it suggests that, while the Indie is nominally sticking by its disgraced plagiarist and Wikipedia vandal, the knives are out for Johann in the newspaper’s offices.
Did new editor Chris Blackhurst order Hari’s removal from the Pink List? Quite possibly, since Blackhurst is thought to be furious at the way conniving Simon Kelner and naïve Andreas Whittam Smith virtually forced him to keep Johann on the books. Also, bear in mind that the struggling Independent titles are likely to swing a scythe through their newsrooms – sacking journalists who would never dream of telling Johann’s porkies.
The official line is still that Johann Hari will be “welcomed” back to the Indie when he has undergone a period of enforced rehab – sorry, “retraining” – but, given the many x-rated stories about Hari that have yet to surface, Blackhurst would do well to harden his heart. Otherwise, his whole editorship will be discredited by his failure to tackle the intimately related problems of Master Hari and the amphetamine-crazed pornographer David Rose.
P.S. Here’s a little titbit for Hari’s politically correct admirers: apparently, Hari vetoed a New Statesman byline picture on the grounds that it made him look “like he had Down’s syndrome”. Nice.
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Originally published at The Catholic Herald.
Thank the Lord that Adrian Smith, the man shamefully demoted and humiliated in one of the most outrageous assaults on private Christian conscience in recent memory, has plucked up the fortitude to sue his employers.
Quite right too. Smith, a housing working in Manchester, was sacked from his job and shunted down into a much more junior – and less well paid – job, because he had the temerity to suggest that marriage perhaps ought to be between a man and a woman.
He did so privately, and on his own Facebook page, but was disciplined by Trafford Housing Trust for breaching its “code of conduct”. I dread to think of the endless, politically correct garbage that “code of conduct” must consist of. No doubt if he had tweeted, “I’m not entirely sure that the Trust needs all these Diversity Support Officers,” he’d have found himself in similarly hot water.
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