Eye Shadow: London

Eye Shadow. London Eye, April 2011

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

As the sun set on a stunning day in London last Friday I took this shot of the London Eye as its' shadow passed across the front of the Shell Building.

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MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 15); Borders, Indigo,

Short this week due to travel: Borders' management are under fire for the seemingly unjustified executive bonus plan they put in place (Reuters)

In a filing on Thursday, the U.S. Trustee's Office said the plan to pay 17 executives, 25 "director-level" employees and additional "key" employees over $8 million in bonuses was "really a disguised retention plan for insiders, which also provides for discriminatory bonuses for non-insiders".The Trustee's Office, which is the Justice Department agency charged with overseeing the administration of bankruptcy cases, said Borders failed to show that the proposed payments complied with the bankruptcy code."Seeking the approval of the bonus motion at this early juncture, prior to the debtors finalizing their business and operational plans is not a sound exercise of the debtors' business judgment," said Tracy Hope Davis, the U.S. Trustee, in the filing.

Locked in a bathroom (Telegraph):

I have long observed that the success of a social occasion depends upon at least one individual sacrificing their dignity for the merriment of others: witness the guest who found herself locked in the loo at a book launch I went to on Monday night. Attempts to break down the door left the young aesthetes winded, and eventually our stumped hostess called in the fire brigade. This took the drama to new and enthralling levels, and drinks consumption trebled.Soon afterwards, the prisoner was freed and the firemen chivalrously allowed her to flee down the stairs before she could be identified. I was glad the poor woman was spared her blushes, but longed to tell her she was in excellent company. Margaret Thatcher, as Leader of the Opposition, had to be "released from bondage" when her bathroom door stuck fast in a Detroit hotel. In the days after John Smith's death, when Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were haggling over the leadership, Blair received a text message during one peculiarly long hiatus: "Tony. It's Gordon. I'm locked in the toilet." Blair couldn't resist writing: "You're staying there until you agree."

Heather Reisman profiled as the best book retailer (The Star):

Reisman, billing herself early on as a merchant of "culture" and not just books, successfully diversfied her product mix to include upscale giftware and stationery, going beyond music and DVDs that even Canadian Tire now sells in "dump bins" in its corriders.

I thought at that time, in the early 2000s, that Reisman, 61, risked junking up her stores with the non-book inventory, muddying the image of Indigo/Chapters. I was wrong. While too much of the early non-book merchandise was shoddy or too cute, Reisman steadily narrowed and refined the non-book demo. That has since been a big driver of sales, up 11% over the past four years in a flat market for traditional booksellers. Indigo also launched and is the largest owner in Kobo, an e-reader intended to guard and ideally grow Indigo's bookselling franchise. Kobo is pitted against rivals including Kindle, iBooks and Google Inc.'s nascent Editions e-book store. An online bookstore as well as an e-reader, Kobo comes pre-installed in a number of smartphone and tablet devices. It's unique in operating on the EPUB open standard devised by the global book trade. Which means Kobo works on all manner of devices, while Amazon's Kindle has been selective in developing apps for favored device makers.

The great debate: Will Publishers' exist was a bit of a bust but here's a short write up (The Bookseller):

Franklin said that while digital meant self-publishing was easy, it did not mean authors could replicate all of a publisher's work. "If you self-publish on the internet, you might as well not bother, you will be silent," he said. "Free is far too much to pay for the overwhelming majority of books self-published‚ you can't even give them away." Both Charkin and Franklin pointed to the health of the fair as evidence that publishing was still vital. Franklin added that so long as publishers provided a service that connected readers to authors, they would remain in business. "The job of publishers is to persuade readers that they should part with money to read an author's work," he said. However, both admitted that publishing had to change. Charkin said it had to begin marketing 24/7, and improve its speed of production. Franklin also conceded that publishing was not in a "healthy state" and warned: "Some publishers will go bankrupt this year."

Diversification at ThomsonReuters?

A good overview of ThomsonReuters and an interview with CEO Tom Glocer in the Gulf News:

The Thomson Reuters' focus on serving professional markets means that its prospects are more linked to the level of professionalization in a given country or market, than its GDP. "If there are more scientists, wealth managers, doctors, lawyers, then the demand for our content and software is correspondingly higher," said Glocer.

"In the more rapidly developing parts of the world you are seeing quite a steep curve of rapid professionalization. People are building legal systems. Think of all the new universities."

"So even if it has less than many countries in Asia in absolute terms, the GCC is significant in terms of rate of growth. In the Middle East our financial information services are still the fastest growing: in double-digits before the recession, and moving back towards double-digits now," he said.

"We have a very global view that our services are intended to go everywhere, but our legal services have to be more tied to the laws and languages of an area. So we have invested in that as a special regional or country service."

"We have just acquired the rights to the leading electronic collection of legal information in Saudi, Rashamoun."

Siam Intercontinental 1970

Siam Intercontinental 1970, originally uploaded by Personanondata - Michael Cairns.

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

A much younger PND family lived in the white building on the left on the second floor at the far end between 1968 and 1969. The tower block was constructed and completed around 1967 whereas the main hotel - with the red tile roof - was opened in 1960. For many years the Interconti was the hot spot in town and, with the Oriental, the only top class hotel in Bangkok.

The stately building on the upper left was the current Kings' mothers' residence.

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