alexmanchester.com

Patent wars: Google buys Motorola Mobility

Google buying Motorola Mobility is a massive acquisition in the tech world. There's some fantastic analysis on the news, but this paragraph by Jon Gruber captures it all nicely: 

Google just spent almost two years of its profits to buy a second-rate phone maker that itself is unprofitable,¹ almost went bankrupt, and is arguably only the third-best maker of Android devices, behind HTC and Samsung.

It's going to take a lot of ads to claw that purchase back, but it will likely be worth it to stave off a potentially humiliating, patent-based destruction of Android. 

Also a great question raised today: What is it again that Google do; software, hardware, sales...?

Who knows. They do still make a ton of money, though, this purchase will be funded out of the $35 billion sitting in Google's cash account. 

[Daring Fireball(s)]

Aussie liberal leader heads to Twitter (True story!)

The interminable US Presidential election has widely been recognised as being a watershed for social media in politics. Barack Obama using services such as Twitter is the best example and his behaviour filtered across the pond to the UK, where 10 Downing Street started Twittering.

Now, Australian opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has begun using the service, under the username @turnbullmalcolm (there's already an imposter using his proper @malcolmturnbull username).

Covered first yesterday on News.com.au, and then picked up on Twitter itself, I wondered aloud if it was really him - the Malcolm Turnbull.

And so it seems, it is. Having seen my post, he replied in kind and did the same with numerous others. Yes, Malcolm Turnbull, leader of the Australian opposition, multi-millionaire and former head of Goldman Sachs, is on Twitter.

My best foot forward

In sync with the relaunch of the Step Two Designs website, welcome to my own new blog at www.alexmanchester.com.

Having recently left Melcrum (where my previous blog posts remain), and started at Step Two, the purpose of this blog is to explore and discuss the topic of intranets, including social computing, enterprise 2.0, collaboration, KM, information architecture, usability and a whole host of other stuff.

There will, no doubt, be intermissions featuring other topics, but otherwise this will very much be a work-oriented blog. If you want to know more about me specifically, here's the About Page. You can also follow me on Twitter.

So, welcome, and please feel free to leave a comment or email me with questions, suggestions and so on.

Alex