We’ve been catching up this week. We got the CineEurope report finished and Matt has worked late into his night to complete the report on Chris’s event in Hollywood last week, so for the first time in a couple of months, we’re up to date on event reports. Phew!
In technology terms, we’re just about into the time of the ‘silly season’ – a phrase used to describe the period in the summer months when, historically, the governments in Western Europe were away on holiday and there was ‘no news’, so newspapers have ‘silly stories’. That means that we struggled to find good front page stories and delayed our production until late in order to try to find some late ‘hot off the press’ news. There was plenty of general news about, especially from the US as duties came in against Chinese products and Scott Pruit resigned. In the UK, Theresa May has a defining Brexit meeting today. In Germany, Mrs Merkel has had a spat with Viktor Orban of Hungary over migration, after resolving some of her domestic issues with her allies, for now at least.
Of course, the World Cup restarts today for the quarter finals after a couple of days of no action (and while we in England get over the shock of winning a world cup game on penalties – it hasn’t happened before!). The Tour de France starts tomorrow, so we’re really getting into summer mood.
However, I didn’t see anything that I really thought was ‘stop the press’ display news.
We’ll be taking a one week publishing break in two week’s time, unless something extremely dramatic happens. (We commit to publishing 48 issues per year and got to 25 by last week, half way through the year, so are well ahead of where we need to be). We’ll still be publishing articles most days on the website, even during the ‘break’.
One article that I have been planning to write for several weeks, but didn’t get time to cover, was a quick report on the annual Mary Meeker ‘Internet Trends Report’ – an annual injection of data. The full (294 slides) powerpoint is available here and if your job involves almost anything smart, it’s worth a look. (https://www.recode.net/2018/5/30/17385116/mary-meeker-slides-internet-trends-code-conference-2018). Actually, if you are at all involved in technology it’s worth, at least, listening to her presentation which is about 30 minutes.
As we’ve highlighted before, based on talks by IHS, Meeker emphasises how important China is in driving commerce innovation as well as online service development. China now has more penetration of ecommerce than any other region and that is driving innovation in retail as well as in technology. Turning to the US, Meeker shows the very long term trends in how consumers are spending their money. TVs and computers are among the items that have dropped in price most, as many of our readers will know.
I mentioned last week that we were looking for ideas for a term for ‘distributed’ LEDs and, as we haven’t had a better suggestion, so far, we’re going to stick with ‘sparse matrix’ for now, as it highlights the secondary advantage of microLEDs – the potential space between them.
Bob
