The wisdom of Charlie Munger

September 20th, 2014






From here.

12 lines from Munger is worth more than 5 of your business books, Horatio.

There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire is run. It’s all about what [Mr. Munger’s friend] Peter [Kaufman] calls ‘exploiting unrecognized simplicities.’ We [Messrs. Buffett and Munger, their shareholders and the companies they have acquired] have selected one another. It’s a community of like-minded people, and that makes most decisions into no-brainers. Warren and I aren’t prodigies. We can’t play chess blindfolded or be concert pianists. But the results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage that more than compensates for a lack of IQ points.

Nobody has a zero incidence of bad news coming to them too late, but that’s really low at Berkshire. Warren likes to say, ‘Just tell us the bad news, the good news can wait.’ So people trust us in that, and that helps prevent mistakes from escalating into disasters. When you’re not managing for quarterly earnings and you’re managing only for the long pull, you don’t give a damn what the next quarter’s earnings look like.

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Fluffy Links – Monday September 15th 2014 – 100 days until Christmas

September 15th, 2014

It’s for charity yeah, you do realise that if you want some business to help your charity, it can cost them a lot? A guide on how best to “pitch” your charity to a business.

How to own it on Instagram, a guide. TLDR; – Go niche, one picture a day, pose, edit, network.

Social Media for Business – Cork City, October 28th.

4 week, 8 module digital marketing course with Cork Chamber. Cost is same as some training orgs charge per day.

Measurement.ie slide decks.

When I read idiotic tech opinions in the Irish Times, I should hold the same standard to the rest of the paper. Why don’t I? The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Infinity apps. This guy spent a year working with a “distraction free” iPhone. – Removed mail and browser and so used it for calls, texts and music. Maybe he could have bought the original iPhone? Still, it will make your life calmer.

The Late Late Toy Show is on November 28th 2014. Tickets for it can be applied for online from October 10th.

Ben Thompson rightfully asks where the “Why the Apple Watch?” bit never happened at the keynote when previous big launches always had the “Why is this needed?”.

Culture night 2014 is this Friday. Here’s what’s happening in Cork.

How to get yourself into eating healthy food.

This site tracks utterances of homophobic language on Twitter. There’s a lot of it. Sister services for racist, sexist and anti-traveler tweets would make interesting and saddening projects.

J1 connect. Thursday September 25th. U.S. Embassy doing an event for J1 alumni who are interested in working, studying or setting up business in America.

Go the fuck to sleep, Werner Hertzog edition:

Doesn’t need to be Christmas for unicorns

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Fluffy Links – Monday September 1st 2014

September 1st, 2014

So yes, I’m now playing around with Christmas.ie and hope to get some content on it soon.

The Maker’s Manual explores how everyone from do-it-yourselfers and artists to inventors and entrepreneurs are leveraging new tools, platforms and services to take their ideas from concepts to reality.

The Bunreacht app by @nathanshox is back and updated Get your copy now legal eagles and freemen of the land .

Teens: “Half the time I don’t really buy any brands. I just bought a pair of fake Doc Martens because I don’t really care.” But high end tech gear like Beats and Iphones, all over them

Legal risks for media outlets using user generate content. From the BBC Journo school blog. Again. Super stuff.

The V+A have an upcoming digital design weekend. Would love to go.

They use the phrase “potty mouth” so I have no respect for these fucking clowns.

MSN Messenger is shutting down. Should we have a wake?

Disney Drones coming to a key near you. Dumbo will be the first one? Then Buzz Lightyear?

What’s especially interesting about this long-brewing rivalry, is how differently Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks have approached the act of marketing themselves. The two companies own around 60% of the country’s coffee market–with Starbucks controlling an estimated 36% and DD roughly 24%.

Coffee bigger than donuts.

An interesting one for the Apple origin story. Seems they didn’t rip off Xerox, Xerox gave them all the stuff they were working on in return for a deeply discounted amount of Apple stock. I wonder when they sold that stock?

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Future of media bla-de-bla

August 26th, 2014

Actually, this is interesting enough.

So Buzzfeed gets $50 from Andreessen Horowitz, decides it will create a movie studio.

Post this, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talk “software will destroy the world” and more in this podcast.

Meanwhile one of the other Bens talks on a podcast about why Buzzfeed is a very interesting investment. Supporting blog post from him. The way they do “native” advertising could be one future of media. Advertiser picks a topic/area and Buzzfeed does a Buzzfeed on interesting content with the advertiser marked as a sponsor.

Re/Code are now doing it too. What’s interesting there is their journalists DO NOT write this content but do we really look at who write pieces? Well actually, I do as you can easily spot biases depending on the writer. For example you can see who is in bed with what tech company in the broadsheets quite easily. Metaphorically.

And 2013 content and traffic starlet Upworthy are getting hit by traffic decreases which they blame on training their new staff. New one on me that one. How long does it take to train these staff and does not say something about the structure that bringing new staff on board causes dips in traffic for months?

Upworthy, Buzzfeed and even most Irish media websites are over dependent on Facebook right now. And now Facebook at last have said they’re going to combat click bait articles. Interesting to me is they’re using a lot og techniques Google uses to measure if a site is good content or not e.g. how quickly they click back to FB, the faster = less quality.

These few tips on how to increase or sustain reach on Facebook may be of use.

Now look at this switch too. MLB TV streams are moving away from desktops to devices. They’ll also move from traditional TV stations to streams too. Goodbye TV stations maybe, definitely “channels”.

So this is why Twitch which was meant to be bought by YouTube is being bought by Amazon now for nearly $1 Bn in cash. Twitch is 3 years old. 3! Retaining their independence with Amazon seems to be the message. Remaining independent is the hot new thing. Twitch is where gamers stream their games and millions of people watch them every month. It’s huge and it seems nobody in “traditional’ media saw it coming. This is going to happen more and more.

In January, Twitch reported that 58 percent of its viewers spent more than 20 hours per week on the site.

20 hours!

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Fluffy Links – Monday August 25th 2014

August 25th, 2014

This is exact;y why I do training and talks even if it’s the same talk nearly every time. You learn more by teaching it or prepping as if you’re going to teach it.

Traffic to Telegraph surges because of deeper thinking and integration with Facebook.

Risky podcasts. Well, podcasts on risk.

Would love to see this for Ireland. Searches from poor areas and wealthy areas.

Tom Doorley on Cork restaurants and the ones he likes.

Livermorium. If I were to have a heavy metal band, that’s the name. (It’s the heaviest metal in the world).

Fiat gets their Tumblr audience.

Citizen Journalism bolloxology. A smartphone doesn’t make you a reporter but here are some BBC tips on how to report better if you happen upon a newsworthy event.

Growth Hacking as a term has a higher bullshit ding than SEO but this post on getting 100s of thousands of email leads. It’s actually simple enough stuff with a little automation.

Rageviews

By @mikearauz “My Company Adopted a Holacracy. It Kind of Sucked”.

A bit dense but. Things I’ve learned from Andy Rachleff.

Just. Wow. Unicorns!

Critics say this is the best documentary film ever

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Fluffy Links – Monday August 11th 2014

August 11th, 2014

Ireland’s first Mobile Journalism conference with a tonne of workshops. March 2015.

One day there’ll be millions of mini-satellites in space that you can rent and use like some kind of Amazon Web Service. SSaaS – Space Satellite as a Service or something like that. A Scottish company is already on their way to this, they’re called Clyde Space and one of their mini-sats called the Funcube can be connected to by schools.

For shame. Really, Irish number ones. So much novelty shite.

Remember Dollar Shave Club? They’re doing VERY well as it happens. Razors, by post. It works.

Digitising the life of Salman Rushdie.

Wikipedia apps for the developing world. Free access. Now if they had some peer to peer option to share the offline content with other phones, it would be really clever.

More ways to earn from your clients without being a pushy git.

Ice cream that changes colour when you lick it. Very Willy Wonka.

A bit dense but good. Business lessons from Andy Rachleff.

Not a fan of Andreessen of late but this podcast on bundling and unbundling can give you insight if you are in business or want to get into business.

Time chunks not time confetti. Managing your time. And another guide says kind of the same thing but also encourages you to log your time, almost like a food diary.

Sir Christopher Meyer on maintaining peace. “if you want your neighbour to be peaceful and friendly, don’t make him thin and angry, make him fat and prosperous”

Ask two friends to reach recommend a book you should read. Find the connection between the two of them.

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The future of PR – Robots

August 6th, 2014

Stay with me on this. See the recent BBC news piece about a Korean baseball team adding in robots to the crowd so it appears the team is followed more than they are? Sure, people have been buying followers for years in the virtual spaces but now it’s physical spaces.

And at the same time we have these scientific studies showing how humans will mimic the facial expressions of robots. Silly humans.

The spontaneous mimicry of others’ emotional facial expressions constitutes a rudimentary form of empathy and facilitates social understanding

This mimicry occurs even though these participants find the android unsettling and are fully aware that it lacks intentionality

Now the study does say when the android is videoed instead of being in person, less mimicry occurs. They can fix that I bet. See the issue here is we mistrust someone as we can read their face and even the best trained PR people do actually find it hard to physically hide their lies despite what comes out of their mouth. But with with robots you can perfectly program the facial expressions and we’ll smile back to the “genuine” smile. A physiological study shows that when people give their driverless cars names, they are more forgiving when the vehicle has an error.

So another oil spill and this time BP whips out the robo-spokesperson who like Johnny-Cab, tells you with a face full of contrition that they are sorry and it wasn’t their fault. Suckers.

And this from a few years ago when two bots argue with each other

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Fluffy Links – Tuesday August 5th 2014

August 5th, 2014

Last chance to book a place at the Twitter workshop in Dublin tomorrow.

LukeW: Offline First is the new Mobile First.

Mentions of burgers, celtic tiger and beer on Yelp Dublin over the years. Kind of a useless tool really.

This almost reads like a whistle-blowing system for Central Bank Employees.

Working with your customers to co-design products/services.

A night in the museum, sleepovers for adults. Can we do this is the dead zoo?

This is a RIG. BBC video production rig. What comes after the very expensive steadicam.

This Gareth Pugh guy seems to be very much inspired by sci fi. Beautiful fashions.

I really like this. Just another great way that comic books are being so creative with how they communicate.

Where all those user interface symbols come from.

Genius. Order your food with a certain accent to get a discount. Or arrive as a super hero.

How to “paint” WiFi. Clever way to make invisible wifi appear to be visible.

No fuckhead you are NOT a storyteller:

You are not a storyteller – Stefan Sagmeister @ FITC from FITC on Vimeo.

Full double album

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Don’t Wait – Ira Glass Quote

July 29th, 2014

Ira Glass, from a Lifehacker interview.

Don’t wait for permission to make something that’s interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don’t wait. Find a story idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who’ll give you notes to make it better. Don’t wait till you’re older, or in some better job than you have now. Don’t wait for anything. Don’t wait till some magical story idea drops into your lap. That’s not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up. Begin now. Be a fucking soldier about it and be tough.

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Fluffy Links – Monday July 28th 2014

July 28th, 2014

Sports doesn’t have to be on a field with mud or in a ring with blood. Sky Sports and others won’t cop this for years but those who get in early and build a viewing audience will get acquired by the old giants.

12 lessons from waking at 0430 each week day.

Books:
Women in Space. 23 stories of awesome astronauts and space industry people.

Books to read this Summer as suggested by Bill Gates.

Another growth hacking ebook but this looks good. Big name case studies.

YOU MAKE TIME. But where do you find the time to read books? I hear the same about doing SEO for websites, doing social media updates etc. etc.

Another reading list from Responsive.org

Now the robots are making us mimic them. Be scared.

Very good slidedeck from Kathryn Parkes at the recent Refresh event. All about storytelling and user interfaces.

Bacteria that feed off electrons. Bound to happen. Could they feed off us?

How to make cute chalkboard signs from cardboard.

You iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, just one big (or small) data logging device that can phone home. (PDF file)

LittleBits is such a cool site and concept. Receive a text message when someone rings your doorbell.

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