Image of the Week: Organ of State
Philip Hammond, the new UK chancellor of the exchequer, arrived for his first cabinet meeting chaired by British prime minister Theresa May on Tuesday, and as the former foreign secretary, he wasn't going to be making any rookie errors like, say, carrying open files with visible text that can be photographed, blown up and turned into front-page gaffes. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh has already coined "Hammondism", the flavour of which has yet to emerge, but the chancellor's debut speech did include the assurance that he does not believe in a magic "money tree", which is something of a relief in today's post-factual politics.
In numbers: Tumblr tumble
$1.1bn Sum that embattled Yahoo spent on "microblogging" platform Tumblr in 2013. At the time, it promised Tumblr users it wouldn't "screw it up".
$750mWhat Yahoo said it had paid in goodwill (over and above the balance sheet value) when it acquired Tumblr three years ago. In February, it warned that it might end up writing all of this off.
$482m How much Yahoo wrote off the value of Tumblr this week, following an earlier impairment charge of $230 million, suggesting its purchase is well on the way to being worthless.
The Lexicon: Dollar Shave Club
The first rule of Dollar Shave Club is to make lots of money from flogging cheap razors to the world's few remaining non-bearded men. The second rule of Dollar Shave Club is to then make even more money by selling up to consumer goods group Unilever for $1 billion. Inspired by the Californian start-up and other companies, personal care giants are now reinventing ecommerce sales as subscription "clubs", imbuing the simple business of shifting everyday products online with a tech industry gloss, complete with tech industry jargon. Unilever's Kees Kruythoff describes Dollar Shave Club as "an innovative and disruptive male grooming brand with incredibly deep connections to its diverse and highly engaged consumers". Smooth. Very smooth.
Getting to know: Hermann Hauser
Hermann Hauser is one of the founders of Arm, the iPhone chip-maker from the "Silicon Fen" (aka Cambridge) that was this week bought out by Japan's SoftBank (the company behind the Pepper robot). He feels sad about the deal, and "not out of some misplaced sense of nostalgia," he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Times. Arm's management have, up to now, been able to take the "brilliant, strategic decisions", and this may not be the case within the confines of a larger company, he argues. But what is "sadder still" is that the takeover was enabled by the post-Brexit fall in sterling. "As an Austrian who made his home in Cambridge, I sincerely hope that the UK can negotiate an exit that will protect the freedom of movement of talent and ideas that the EU has provided."
The list: Pokémoronic places
Danger! High voltage! That means nothing to the stereotypical kidult Pokémon player, kindly providing the media with endless stories about playing the augmented reality mobile game in places were reality is augmented enough. Here are five.
1 Roads: Drivers don't like it much when pedestrians flirt with death by making deeply erratic movements while playing with their smartphones. Pedestrians aren't too fond of drivers doing it either.
2 Underground stations: New York's transport authority has had to remind subway users to stay behind the yellow line while hunting cartoon monsters.
3 Police stations: A wanted criminal in Michigan didn't pay too much attention to the fact the Pokémon Go "gym" was a real-life police station, where he was promptly arrested. "Sometimes they make our job easy for us," said police chief Tom Lindberg.
4 Military bases: Indonesian police detained and then released a French man who inadvertently trespassed on a military base. He had been chasing Pokémon while jogging.
5 Minefields: Players in Bosnia have been warned that it's not a good idea to try to "catch them all" in fields laden with 1990s landmines.
