Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Incongruous segues

I sat down this morning for breakfast with a bowl of fresh picked strawberries from our yard on top of “Crunchy Nuggets” (the generic answer to Grape-Nuts®). Because I only had a few minutes, I decided to read the Merc (which usually takes 10 minutes) instead of the Wall Street Journal (which could take an hour).

The front page talked about Microsoft-Yahoo, and the business section led with Hasbro‘s latest response to Scrabulous, the unlicensed (and possibly infringing) ad-supported Scrabble knock-off up on Facebook. (Note this comment on how Mattel and Hasbro split worldwide Scrabble rights which has fragmented their response to this challenge).

SegwayBut it was the 2nd business page (2C) that alerted me to at least one (probably more) incongruous segue in the tech world.

  • Doug Field, the former CTO of Segway (the electric vehicle company) has become VP of product design for Apple, working for SVP Jonathan Ive. I wonder what the reuse of skills or expertise is here?
  • The LA Times reminds us (via the Merc) that battery-powered portable TVs become useless with next February’s digital TV handover. The recommended alternatives: $200 battery powered TV, use your laptop, run the DTV-to-NTSC box using an inverter, or get TV service on your phone.
  • The newspaper ran a 1/9 page ad entitled “Ads by Google”, with plugs for B&H Photo and four other vendors. Apparently this is an old program, but I hadn’t seen it before.
Is it possible to have more than one segue, i.e. is the plural of segue "segues"? Most people don’t know how to spell segue (although I imagine more can spell the scooter).

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