tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-108784402007-10-08T00:52:35.566+01:00David RowanBlogger641125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-61591496212588637722007-09-22T22:48:00.000+01:002007-10-05T23:02:14.886+01:00

By David Rowan Sir Ronald Cohen made millions in private equity. Now he wants to use his knowledge and wealth to solve a few little problemsLet's say you sit on the Sunday Times Rich List at £260 million, are married to an accomplished movie producer, and have yourself attained such business success that you are lauded as an entire industry's "founding father". When the time comes finally to

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-67525805485323016112007-07-31T23:03:00.000+01:002007-10-05T23:01:44.040+01:00

By David Rowan Have you poked a friend today? Your answer will determine your loyalties in the greatest intergenerational split since the Sex Pistols gobbed at Bill Grundy on live TV. Friend-poking, along with superpoking, wall-posting and hikkuping – as the clued-in among you could yawningly explain – is simply an internet-enabled social greeting. The rest of us – especially, duh, the dinosaurs

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-6290276381169952622007-05-26T19:26:00.000+01:002007-05-26T19:34:31.123+01:00

By David Rowan Welcome to Googletown, where, as you sip your skinny decaf, a cup-embedded chip instantaneously analyses your salivary DNA, allowing cafe staff to greet you personally as their screens retrieve your online profile. Stroll down the street, and an eye-scanning digital billboard reminds you to buy a birthday present for your mother, helpfully suggesting the perfume brand she e-mailed

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1174779589992895322007-03-25T00:31:00.000Z2007-03-25T00:39:50.020Z

David Cameron gives his first major interview in a Jewish publication to JC editor David Rowan David Cameron, he would like it known, is an enthusiastic friend of the Jewish people. "I have great admiration and respect for what the community's achieved," he begins in the back seat of his official Opposition car - the "greener" hybrid petrol-electric Lexus that he requested, albeit with no

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1166999504739634462006-12-23T22:28:00.000Z2006-12-24T22:31:44.770Z

By David Rowan Can it already be Trendsurfing's third end-of-year review? That gives us a rare opportunity to step back from the avalanche of buzz and innovations and work out which of the past twelve months' trends are likely to have staying power. So here are a few predictions of themes that we will be hearing much more about in the months to come. Wise up to crowd power: If you need a job

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1167345080068184152006-12-22T22:29:00.000Z2006-12-28T22:37:47.456Z

A Jewish money-man is pushed into the traditional scapegoat role. How convenient. By David Rowan Augustus Melmotte would have recognised the cold, searing blade of sudden ostracism. Until his inevitable downfall, Melmotte, the anti-hero of Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", had bought himself an outsider's ticket to the heart of the British establishment: holding court at his ostentatious

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1166304551231932132006-12-16T21:27:00.000Z2006-12-16T21:30:02.456Z

By David Rowan It's not just Leonardo DiCaprio and his film Blood Diamond that De Beers has to worry about. Over the next few months, the diamond cartel faces its biggest challenge in years: the roll-out to jewellers and consumer websites of a new generation of convincingly genuine stones grown entirely in a lab. As manufacturing technology races ahead, with more and more firms creating diamonds

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1166304453439423802006-12-09T21:22:00.000Z2006-12-16T21:27:33.536Z

By David Rowan You use Wikipedia as a vast online free dictionary. You click around annotated mash-ups of Google Maps to share other people's thoughts on everything from recommended pubs to property prices. So it was inevitable that the publishing industry, too, would succumb to the power of collective intelligence. That quaint old notion of a professional editor being assigned to fine-tune an

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1165104663950362592006-12-02T00:09:00.000Z2006-12-03T00:13:23.413Z

By David Rowan They're calling it "Cellywood" - the new moviemaking industry that fits into your cellphone. Ever since handsets evolved colour screens and data speeds rocketed, filmmakers amateur and professional have been experimenting to develop custom-made movies intended for mobile-phone screens. Suddenly, the cellphone cinema trend is luring big-name directors and dominating film festivals

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1164537581843525102006-11-25T10:36:00.000Z2006-11-26T10:39:41.866Z

By David Rowan It can be so hard for the fashionable holiday-maker to stay ahead. Just when you had caught up with Siberia or the Arctic as the latest hip destination, along come the trendhunters to warn you that actually you have got it all wrong. It is not location that now determines where you should head, but rather the "concept" of your journey that marks you out as happening. So strap

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1163966323354068622006-11-18T19:57:00.000Z2006-11-19T19:58:43.373Z

By David Rowan Stuck for what Christmas presents to buy? Maybe you need the collective intelligence of a few thousand other shoppers to advise you. With Christmas online sales predicted to rise a fifth over last year, a new swath of recommendation services is fighting to be the consumer’s first port of call. With names such as Crowdstorm, Kaboodle, StyleHive and Whatsbuzzing, these internet

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1163294409243748232006-11-11T01:17:00.000Z2006-11-12T01:20:09.300Z

By David Rowan Be careful what you believe on the internet: there's a growing chance that you are being hoaxed by a cynical PR firm. Just as the blogging explosion was teaching us about "vlogs" (video blogs) and "moblogs" (mobile blogs), along comes yet another trend that is far more pernicious. A "flog" is a fake weblog which purports to chronicle an ordinary consumer's passion for a business

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1162853299541869902006-11-04T22:46:00.000Z2006-11-06T22:48:19.573Z

By David Rowan What’s the difference between playing a computer game and watching a plot- twisting TV drama series such as Lost or 24? Increasingly, less than you might think. In a trend that is beginning to sweep through the vast computer-gaming industry, developers are turning away from releasing all-inclusive narrative epics and instead allowing their stories to drip out one episode at a time

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1162243545792268002006-10-28T21:22:00.000+01:002006-10-30T21:25:45.873Z

By David Rowan Congratulations: you are one heck of a powerful person. In a few mouse-clicks, you have the ability to disrupt multinationals’ marketing plans, re-programme TV networks and even enact new laws on whatever takes your fancy. In fact, thanks to the extraordinary growth of online petitions, you can have your say on anything from the content of a Beyoncé music video to sanctions in

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1161509419532275562006-10-21T10:29:00.000+01:002006-10-22T10:30:19.553+01:00

By David Rowan You need to know if your husband has been cheating on you. Or you have to prove to police that when you sold those shares it wasn’t with insider knowledge. Until now, sorting the truth from deception has relied on subjective hunches about individuals’ honesty, or else the discredited measurements of old-fashioned polygraph machines. But what if there were a sleek scientific tool

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1161025723053548392006-10-14T20:06:00.000+01:002006-10-16T20:08:44.240+01:00

By David Rowan As a Times Magazine reader, you cherish a reputation as a cultured, intelligent and stylish connoisseur of quality. But if we wanted to put a price on it, how much would that reputation actually be worth? As more of us buy and sell goods to strangers online, an easily quantifiable reputation for trustworthiness can instantly differentiate the safe shopping partner from the scammer

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1160219384856826312006-10-07T12:08:00.000+01:002006-10-07T12:09:47.816+01:00

By David Rowan You plan your car journeys with MapQuest. You nose around neighbours' property values by navigating map-based websites such as OnOneMap.com. You even track your favourite celebrities' movements in almost-real time by logging on to user-annotated mash-ups of Google Maps. So why wouldn't the ad industry see you as a lost opportunity? With web traffic to online mapping sites growing

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1159745982725472912006-09-30T00:37:00.000+01:002006-10-02T00:39:42.773+01:00

By David Rowan When a new online music service declared last month that it would be taking on iTunes, nobody thought about giving it a cogent, relevant name. Instead, pop fans were invited to visit something inexplicably called SpiralFrog. And when Nintendo recently revealed its groundbreaking new games console, someone decided to name it the Wii – pronounced as in the toilet word. Maybe it’s

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1158455411685122822006-09-18T02:07:00.000+01:002006-09-17T02:10:11.713+01:00

With Mayor Livingstone now so keen to be seen as a friend of the Jewish community, perhaps it is time to send him a personal invitation. Or two - in case he wants to bring his friend Sheikh al-Qaradawi. By David Rowan Ken Livingstone is not the most popular politician among Jewish Chronicle readers. Perhaps it is his choice of friends - Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for instance, viewed by

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1158700404296860492006-09-16T22:08:00.000+01:002006-09-19T22:13:24.420+01:00

By David Rowan Fancy creating a new form of life today? Thanks to extraordinary advances in genetic engineering, meddling with DNA has become a fashionable (and increasingly affordable) hobby for the curious amateur to try at home. You'll need a basic scientific knowledge, of course, and a few lab tools that you can buy over the internet. But if you do want to tinker with life's building blocks

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1157829237484664542006-09-09T20:11:00.000+01:002006-09-09T20:13:57.503+01:00

By David Rowan Well, if there isn't a new music trend in town to get you poppin' yo colla, fo'shezzy! Now that hiphop has evolved to encompass such regional varieties as crunk and Urban Pasifika, suddenly there is yet another emerging sub-genre emerging into mainstream culture. It is called hyphy - pronounced "high-fee" - and it combines a relentlessly energetic dance beat with some rather

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1157193563676720792006-09-02T11:35:00.000+01:002006-09-02T11:39:23.696+01:00

By David Rowan Sometimes a columnist must make sacrifices in the name of research. So for this column’s second anniversary, your intrepid writer agreed to live out probably the most significant trend yet recorded here. Regular readers can feel smug knowing that they picked up on the online video boom here long before YouTube and Google Video began terrifying TV schedulers. But how would the

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1155411428643087872006-08-12T20:35:00.000+01:002006-08-12T20:37:08.673+01:00

By David Rowan If this column were truly up with the trends, these words wouldn’t merely be nestling on glossy paper, they’d be jumping out at you, dancing teasingly before your eyes, and then kissing you sensuously on the lips to say thank you for reading. At least, that’s how a newspaper column ought to behave if it’s to keep up with a fashion that’s currently sweeping through visual media,

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1154991310947785022006-08-06T23:48:00.000+01:002006-08-07T23:56:10.106+01:00

A lifeboat station got nothing; a Peruvian guinea pig farm £2,000. David Rowan investigates what happened to the lottery billions There’s an awful lot you could do with £18.6 billion. Given the chance, you might use it to announce a cure for Aids or malaria: Bill Gates’s charitable foundation, the world’s largest, has invested just a fifth of that on fighting disease, yet already the man from

David Rowantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10878440.post-1154990758225520002006-08-06T23:42:00.000+01:002006-08-07T23:45:58.270+01:00

By David Rowan When two shipwrecked Jews were finally discovered on a tiny desert island their rescuers could not understand why they had spent their days building three synagogues. “Isn’t it obvious?” one of the dishevelled survivors shrugged. “An Orthodox one for me, a Reform one for him — and a third that neither of us would ever set foot in.” When I began editing The Jewish Chronicle three

David Rowan