I was chatting recently with a private equity investor who invests frequently and successfully in US media companies (a relatively difficult thing to do simultaneously) when he mentioned how the Thomson Reuters electronic signs among others in Times Square now drowned-out the once-iconic Allied Chemical Building news zipper. You know the crawling display of news Read More

The quadrennial World Cup was played this year so perhaps I could be excused for thinking it would not be an auspicious time for Argentine — Brazilian relations. However my experience this week in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo belies that assumption. I have been visiting these two great countries regularly for many years including Read More

There is a time for thought and there is a time for action. Most of the items I have posted to this blog are in one form or other thought pieces — journals of ideas. As some of you have pointed out the thoughts are sometimes half-formed or just plain wrong but to me this Read More

I have been mulling over for some time the thought that the tranistion from a single superpower world to a multilateral one coupled with the increasing proportion of commerce which is electronic will require an unprecedented level of international harmonization of law. I chose the annual Oxford Analytica conference at Christ Church Oxford as the Read More

One of pleasures of re-reading great books is that you see different things. Not just because we miss certain things the first time around but because our intervening life experience including our intervening reading gives us new context. So for example a second reading of Salman Rushdie’s great Midnight’s Children revealed many more insights and Read More

I’m now on vacation which means this blog is too. Although I enjoy writing I turn off all electronics for 10 – 14 days a year. As this blog should attest I’m no Luddite but the best way I can relax and also give my family my full attention is not to be reaching for Read More

I have been reflecting for a couple of weeks on the significance of some of the young companies that presented at this year’s Sun Valley Conference always hosted so professionally and graciously by Allen & Co. Thingd presented its vision of the internet of things with crowd-sourced taxonomies of the attributes of these items. Square Read More

"Workflow" is defined by Wikipedia (the term is shunned by most established (read print) dictionaries) as "a sequence of connected steps … a sequence of operations declared as work of a person [or] a group of persons." I have always found the term to be a sadly overused example of marketing doublespeak — what’s wrong Read More

Here I am at 33000 feet again (legally thanks to Cathay Pacific) listening to one of the truly great jazz compositions – Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. Perhaps it was my recent culturally-rich trip to Spain or my brain-jangling Lost in Translation jet lag coming back from Asia that made these mellifluous notes sound Read More

I often get asked when do I find the time to blog. The answer rather self-evidently is right now. I with the not inconsiderable assistance of a 747 and trained crew am flying at 31000 feet en route to Singapore. Whichever direction one leaves from New York it is a long flight. So the question Read More

My two kids don’t like it much when their parents talk about them. Most kids don’t and I was no different. In my fuzzy pre-lawyer mind I claimed a non-existent copyright in the details of my early life. So how much worse it must be for Mariana (age 12) and Walter (10) that I occasionally Read More

For those of you who thought that my recent post on Goldman Sachs was controversial you will no doubt decide that I have certifiably lost my mind to come to the defense of lawyers. Of all the undeserving species that roam the earth none is as commonly reviled as Lawyer Americanus. As many of you Read More

I seldom comment on contentious current events let alone those that affect clients of Thomson Reuters. However the intense global criticism of Goldman Sachs prompts me to join the debate. No sooner had the SEC surprised the firm and the market with its charges of fraud relating to the structuring and marketing of a 2007 Read More

The Apple iPad launched this past weekend amid mass but not untoward hype and hysteria. I have been playing with Steve’s gift to the media and am seriously impressed – not just with the elegant machine I am holding in my hands but with the future it points towards. I hope that readers of this Read More

My last post about the 25 books that influenced me the most (see How to Get into my Good Books) has led predictably to requests that I compile a similar list for musical influences. These requests also reveal an interesting correlation between the age of the writer and the recording format of choice. Troglodytes of Read More

Despite my interest professional and personal in all things digital I get asked now and then to cite the books that have most influenced me. The answer to this question is highly personal. It does not generate a list of the “best” books of all time the pillars of the “Western Canon” or the “Booker Read More

The girls in the family and I took Walter and ten of his classmates to the Rangers game as his 10th birthday party. No greater test of parental love has every been devised than stopping 10 soda-fueled boys from inflicting permanent inner ear damage on one another — not to mention 18200 innocent hockey fans Read More

The theme for this year’s edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos was “Rethink Redesign and Rebuild.” While the actual rebuilding must await the delegates return to their home countries and the transition from talk to action nonetheless the 2010 Forum lived up to its mission. This was the 40th anniversary edition of Davos Read More

Now that Congress is well on its way to passing healthcare (or more accurately health insurance) reform it is time for me to return to the topic of financial regulation. My worry is that with the current predilection of our legislators for policy by sound bite we are unlikely to emerge with thoughtful reform. In Read More

I write on the long way home from a trip that started in Tokyo and ended less than two weeks later in Dubai. During these 12 days I visited customers partners government officials and staff in Tokyo Beijing Shanghai Hong Kong Mumbai Hyderabad Chennai Bangalore Abu Dhabi and Dubai. While Asia and the Gulf are Read More

This week I did something very unusual for a life-long Mets fan: I cheered the Yankees to their record 27th World Series triumph. I have friends not even Mets fans who complain that the Yankees don’t deserve our respect because they simply bought their way to victory. I say the Yankees deserve our praise because Read More

This is a post about curved spacetime. Don’t worry I am not going to attempt an amateur explanation of our four-dimensional universe courtesy of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Instead this is a story of how the current generation of kids relates to time and distance in a fundamentally different way from their parents. I Read More

Why did early broadcast television often show images of announcers standing in a radio studio speaking into microphones? Why did early adopters of cell phones sometimes stand in old phone booths to make calls from the street? And why did the first websites launched by newspaper companies look like electronic versions of yesterday’s paper? [Clue: Read More

I shall turn 50 tomorrow which does not worry me at all. Not having set goals financial or personal that needed to be achieved by a date certain I am free to pursue my open-ended objectives: a happy marriage kids who seek success for their own fulfillment and not for the greater glory of their Read More

I like to play and to watch tennis. Roger Federer has been and remains my tennis hero because of his outstanding record of achievement on the court and because of the classy way in which he wins – he is the most complete and the most elegant player of all time. No one before him Read More