This shit is REAL

The most exciting announcement of the week has to be Breville’s new 3D toaster which we had a chance to play with and were truly astounded us with how 3 dimensional it seemed to be. Breville’s PR rep was over excited:

“Fuck 2d toasters and that 1d bread you had to use till now. This toaster has DEPTH. It’s actually exists in all 3 planes of reality. I can walk around it. It has perspective. It’s INTENSE”

We took off our 3D glasses and we stunned to find the toaster still appeared 3D.

“That’s right. This is true glassless 3d. We have finally achieved the holy grail – fuck Jim Cameron. Fuck him and his space owls.”

Stunning. However Breville were quick to start talking about their upcoming 4D toasters and potentially being able to alter TIME on a scale from 1 to 6 on a dial next to the ‘frozen’ button. MENTAL

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CES Round Up 1: Breville announce 3D Toaster.

Also liked by the tragically unpopular

Samsung’s CEO earlier made this self-flagellatory statement:

“My Social Media tzar burst into my office this morning on his fixed wheel bike, holding a flat-white in one hand and two iPads in the other. After Instagramming his coffee, he told me the astonishing news that some desperately uncool fatty had ‘liked’ us on Facebook. Immediately I assumed it was an awful mistake, that this fat kid had been trying to like ‘Samsonite’ suitcases or something but in fact it was true. I was outraged – our Facebook campaign demographic targeting specifically said ‘ONLY COOL THIN PEOPLE WHO DON’T THINK THEY CAN QUITE AFFORD AN IPHONE’.”

After wiping a tear from his eye as he saw his $40m retirement package slip away, he continued:

“Given this news it was my duty to alert the board and shareholders. I offered to have this child killed like Google have done on previous occasions, but they said no and so we informed the market. Our Social Media Tzar then Instagrammed me crying quietly in the toilet and immediately got 5 likes. ”

Simon was traced to a safe house in Baltimore where he released this statement:

“I do like Samsonite suitcases. But now I’m scared to press the button to express my innermost feelings. ”

James Whitbread, an analyst from Morgan Stanley stated:

“We needed statistically insignificant data points from hip data sources to overreact to. This was a home run. Thanks fatty.”

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Fat kid ‘likes’ Samsung on Facebook. Billions wiped from share value.

Gove said current ICT classes are ‘harmful and dull’, adding that ‘we’re never going to create a technologically advanced race of super-humans by spending seven years teaching kids how to use WordArt.’

The school computer was finally upgraded for a mere £5000

The current curriculum will be replaced with so-called ‘Zuckerberg lessons’, teaching children how to emulate the dull-eyed social networking zillionaire by scratching formulae into window panes, alienating friends and coding late into the night without stopping for toilet breaks.

The move comes just months after the Government announced plans to turn part of the Olympics site into the ‘digital capital of Europe’.

‘Tech City isn’t enough,’ said Gove. ‘Where is Britain’s answer to Farmville? Eh? Basically, until literally everyone in the country is pathologically afraid of making eye contact with anyone except their mums, and at least 73% have two or more bottles of their own urine stashed under their bed, there is little chance we’ll come up with anything as innovative or engaging as the idea of gifting digital sheep.

‘And it’s not like they won’t be able to get girls, either,’ he added. ‘I mean, look at Zuckerberg. His girlfriend is a reet stunner. If anything, the UK’s population will become unbelievably hot.’

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Scrap ICT in favour of Zuckerberg lessons, says Gove

What do they have in common? No, not ‘what are awful things I got for Xmas, Alex’ but a list of advocates who have overly enthusiastically committed to LEARN TO CODE this year.

Being the sharp-nosed, big-butted intrepid reporter, we dropped everything (including our pants) to dig into this troubled trend sweeping Britain. We went undercover into… I-WANT-TO-BE-AN-EVEN-BIGGER-NERD-GATE

Day 1.

I don't understand version control

We met up with our dog on the inside, a stray Irish Setter called Sally in a pub in Clerkenwell. We deeply wanted to understand why Sally had put on Twitter ‘this year I promise to learn to CODE. WOOF’.

“I’m not sure you’ve noticed Bob, but I’m actually a dog. I spend most of my day having to try and avoid getting poo in my fur. It’s fine. But I noticed on Twitter after New Year, that people, average people, average hipsters, were proclaiming that they were going to learn Ruby on Rails. Why? WHO KNOWS! BUT I WAS IN. I couldn’t let this bandwagon go down the road without idiotically chasing it with no idea why I was even – OMG LOOK AT THAT BUTTERFLY OMG IT’S SO GREAT OMG I’M GOING TO HAVE TO GO NOW AND CHASE THAT NOW”

We were distressed. Could it be that the free-riding twitter mob wanted to RISE and take back the reins over who could build pointlessly unproductive productivity apps for their macbook air? Were fat people thinking it’s easier to learn to code and be a fat developer than go on a diet and be a thin normal person? Did my non-English speaking granny need a job as Technical Data Warehousing Architect at Barclays Bank? Did my 4 year old sister want to stick it to the NERDS to prove she could ‘do this coding shit mad easy yo’? DID DOGS WANT TO TAKE OVER TACKLING THE HUGE MYSQL CHALLENGE AT FACEBOOK?

Who knows. All we knew was that something terrible was happening.

Day 2.

A tramp. No wait a developer. No wait definitely a tramp. Um...

We woke up in a bed-sit in Camberwell with two tramps, a massive stack of O’Reilly books and a lot of heroin vials. Tramp 1 was smearing baked beans on the floor trying to explain Object-Oriented programming to me. Tramp 2 was trying to eat the definitive book on PHP. A local hipster popped his head round the corner asking if he could join in. I named him Tramp 3 because of his scraggy facial hair and stupid bicycle. We cracked out the opium and started talking about a great problem that had been troubling us all for weeks.

What does ’10 Print “Hello”. mean?

Day 42.

Half Blogger. Half Developer.

We finally emerged from our chrysalis after 42 days of CodeAcademy bootcamp hell and now fully fledged developers. We were armed with a weird sense of over-confidence and the desire to build obtuse technical solutions for marginal problems. We knew that endless wealth was now within our grasp and that attractive and successful business folk would be clambering to get just 1 second of our time. There was now a whole new world open to us.

But something felt wrong. Something deep inside. Something troubling. And then we realised.

WE WERE DEVELOPERS…..

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Small Dog Commits to Learn How to Code in 2012

To celebrate the impending priapic launch of TechChuff 3.1 in the next few weeks, we thought we’d kick off 2012 with a review of the much shitter 2011. While most of you drones spent the year going about your day-to-day DULLNESS of real-life GRINDING while contributing to society and creating value, we did pretty much nothing. Roughly 1 blog post, maybe 30 tweets and a couple of fancy but inappropriate gestures to children.

In all, a success.

But from our space-station orbiting Earth what did we observe as the key victories for the human race last year in the field of TECHNOLOGY AND ANIMATED GIFS?  Apart from further mobile internet penetration in developing countries and increased investment in technology ventures in the West despite worsening global economic conditions? APART FROM THAT?!

WE GOT LOADS.

1. Infographics.

How are we only getting around to abusing this now? While in 2009 we predicted that the Top 10 list would become the currency of the internet – we were wrong.  So now we are finally getting our mighty oar out of our pants and slapping it vigorously upon this Etch-a-Sketch medium for the innumerate.

Awarded an A* in A-Level Geography

Are you a designer or content producer who thinks their audience are mainly 3 year old children with mono-vision?

Working for an incompetent SEO agency needing barely-relevant linkbait about celebrity bra-sizes for your toilet U-bend retailer client?

Are you yourself an unemployable geography graduate and can only understand and express relative and absolute numbers with lego block pictures and inappropriately selected chart types?

Do want to present numbers in a clearer way but want to do it in a way so ineptly you actually make it harder to understand?

BREAK OUT THE PIE CHARTS –  IT’S INFORGIVEABLEGRAPH TIME!

2.  Instapaper

Read. That. Shit. Never.  Basically the EU butter mountain but made up of top 10 lists.

3. Instagram

In the future, anthropology students will uncover the remains of Amazon’s EC2 server farm in Antartica (like that bit in Alien vs Predator) and decide that back in 2011 most of the ‘youth’ were GOING BACK IN TIME to the 1960′s as time tourists,  taking endless filtered photos of food and shoes and archiving them for no-one’s pleasure.

Of course in the 60′s the world was lomo-fi filtered to start with.

4. Insta-startup

Take two drops of a vapid celebrity, add three drops of retail flash-sales with a subscription service and a few dashes of either Uzbeki slave labour or inept local merchants and what do you get? That’s right – the ROAD TO ECONOMIC RECOVERY.

However we were sad not to see Charles Manson working with Rosie Huntington-Whitely and BeachMint to start up DeadDogFaceByPostMint; a unique subscription service offering stylish rotting dead dog faces designed by Rosie H-W for just $29.99 a month and totally and utterly UNSUBSCRIBABLE FROM.

Delivered to your door for just $24.99 a month!

5. Tumblr.

Lol. Click. Lol. Click. Lol. Click. Cry. Click. Ponder. Click. Lol. Click. Pick up gun. Click. Shoot self in face.

6. TechChuff.com.  This pitiful excuse for a blog only highlight of the year was getting invited to Buckingham Palace with Mike Butcher of TechCrunch to meet the Queen. It was breathtaking and just a taste of what 2012 will hold for TechChuff Holdings and Petrochemical Refineries Inc. Read it HERE

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The Road to Partition: 2011

1. I N C E P T I O N

The idea. Sometimes you don’t have the benefit of hindsight or foresight nor even a stack of stolen powerpoint presentations to help you. Sometimes it may seem like you need something that very few people actually have: actual talent.

Not so. There is a difference between BEING good and SOUNDING good. To ‘sound good’ requires just the ability to string some words together and to be vaguely continent. To make your new startup-idea sound good just requires a Twitter account. To generate this new startup-idea just requires a badly-calibrated moral barometer, Google Translate and absolutely no shame.

Hence our first tip for the creatively-bankrupt is to just take whatever someone else is doing and DO IT IN GERMAN. When the potential acquirer walks into the room, you just wave your hands around a lot, thump your wurst on the table, tell them this is SEHR FREAKING TOLL, we are in Europe and if they don’t buy you then you’ll just TAKE the money from them. The Samwer triplets were originally one man. CLONING WORKS.

It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times

2. AN ENEMY IS A FRIEND YOU NEVER MET APART FROM THAT TIME IN THAT BAR YOU NEVER MENTION TO ANYONE…

or something. Friends in high-places are key. Thus another sure-fire method to sell your idiotic startup is to play the REALLY FOOKING LONG GAME and engineer the trade-sale. Simply preemptively arrange your entire career-path to ensure you have previously worked for the company you are targeting to be acquired by (The Mark). By having made friends with Bob in M&A while at Company X over a pina colada in the Blue Oyster Bar, you can subtly leech from his mind (or the F:\PRESENTATIONS folder on the shared drive) the entire 5 year strategic acquision plan of company X and therefore setup a startup which ticks all the boxes in his bosses’ spongey brains. So long as you’ve got the words ‘synergistic’, ‘emerging markets’ and ‘win-win-win’ in your mission statement, Company X will come running with a priapism the size of the bank loan they are taking out to buy you. WIN WIN WIN BABY! (until Bob gets fired or Aol has to lay off 2000 staff and shut down your business as they realise it was mainly cheese-based.)

3. EMPEROR’S NEW STARTUP / PASS THE POO PARCEL

A lot of people question the value of the companies being IPO’d in today’s technology boom. A 20 billion dollar valuation for a company making 50p a year now but if you put some numbers into the special magical time-machine and project across the next two billion years then maybe it will payback. MAYBE. MAYBE?!? OH GOD PLEASE PAYBACK.

Who cares. Your goal is to BELIEVE the impossible. THEN SELL IT. So long as along the way you’re hyping the fuck out of your business model, claiming the Total Addressable Market of your product is the entire human race and it’s cumulative GDP from year 0, and just 1% of this is MASSSIVE YO! – you’re winning. You aren’t creating value. You are creating the Pavlovian, slobbering investment-lust in the next sucker in the ‘pass the poo parcel’ game. The goal – the IPO. This is when everyone gets rich – including the bank arranging the deal who also owns 1% of your business. That’s everyone apart from the poor suckers buying the stock, who wakes up wondering why he owns 3 shares in a collapsing online gerbil dating site. MAMA!

And if anyone tries to question you, just reply: ‘The ancient Egyptians didn’t know how to structure a term-sheet. That’s why they are all dead. And so will you be’.

4. GET RICH OR DIE TRYING or HOW WE DID IT

Have sex with Adrianne Huffington. SHAZAM BROTHERS WE WON!

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Top 4 ways to ‘exit BIG’ like we did

Being White is the New Black. And Visa-Versa.

“That’s right motherfuckers,” said out-going CEO Pharrell Willams, “we’ve controlled your ape-like brains. For the last 50 years we have been deciding what is officially ‘cool shit NOW’ and then through an internationally coordinated process of ‘oh so not cool this season’ and ‘this is now so cool’, we got you to stimulate the world economy and our collective prostate by buying stuff you never knew you realised you needed but it made you feel complete inside, while we sat on our big-ass fucking thrones working out how to destroy the Moon. Wait. Sorry. Did I say too much? BAPE JETPACK! LAUNCH!!!”

While until recently it was a simple affair of taking what was cool 20 years ago and repackaging it in a meta-ironic manner in bright-pink, with the resurrection of Apple with Steve Jobs at the helm, things were forced to take a more formal, structured, matt-white approach.

Jobs admitted he was the puppet-master behind the scenes for many years and now will further control ‘what is cool’ across the globe via his Cobra Commander-like henchman, Jonny ‘I’m English therefore ein styleübermensch’ Ives.

“Bitches. Listen. I granted ‘gloss white’ a cool mandate from 2003 to 2004. Black became cool from 2004 to 2005. White was cool again from 2005 to 06 but in matt and bright primary colours were in for a short period while I was on LSD. I then decided brushed chrome was the finish for a new generation, and then gloss white came back in the 08 because I said so. I declared that MMS and Copy-Paste were COOL SHIT last year and now video-calling is officially ‘totally off the hook’. It was never cool before I allowed it to be. Do you understand? NEVER COOL BEFORE I SAID SO.”

Apple fanboys slack-jawed, constant semi-priapic  mumblings of ‘cool, not cool, white, gloss-black, white-black, face time, black face, brrllrlere, must upgrade, iOS, blguguugug, global hypercolour, blurgggg, kill all darkies’, is now clearly a product of a wider global-conspiracy rather than a simple mental deficiency as previously thought.

Finally Jobs admitted there is a monthly MPC-like meeting where he meets with 10 other ‘Heads of Cool Shit’ and just ignores what they suggest and punches one or two of them in the face Kade-style.

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International Committee of ‘Cool Shit NOW’ elects Jonathan Ives as CEO

The murderer? The Internet.

In shocking admission the Internet has admitted that everything that it considers to be ‘old’ and ‘antiquated’ in the eyes of a 16-year old geek from Telford, will be dead by the end of the year. Not just content with killing the Walkman, the wrist-watch, books, spelling, the Filofax and your hot personal-assistant now buried under some permafrost near M40, the Internet has vowed to continue this technological killing spree with gay murdery abandon.

Do we really need rocks in today's Internet Age?

“What’s next?’, said the representative for the Internet, an anonymous comment troll, “EVERYTHING. The Internet is going to render talking, eating, pooing and even weeing dead. You can’t stop the robotic march of progress. Those trousers you are wearing will be yesterday’s technology in days. DAYS!!  We’ve replaced dogs with AIBO’s and we’ll replace that innate sense of family love and joy you have at Christmas with a piece of crafty PHP-coding and great UX design work. Nothing is safe.”

Rumours are still abound that Index Ventures is backing a new start-up which promises to replace ‘the need to do stuff with your actual hands and brain‘ with a web form and some API’s.  These include making pottery, learning to tango and touching yourself. All quickly and easily serviced by the power of the cloud, TCP/IP, Mashable and the relentlessly egotastic drive to build marginal shit by geeks around the world.

The 16-year old from Telford gave us a final comment:

“Cows. Fuck’em. I ain’t seen one in real life.  There needs to be an app for that”.

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“Everything Old is Dead”, Declares Entire Internet

No need for air-conditioned server rooms at -233°C

With Mininova being forced to shut down by the Order of Utrecht, it seems like there are no longer any nations willing to take the risk of being ‘that really cool country with like, NO LAWS AND SHIT MAN!’.

‘It was difficult to be honest. We used to be able to act all badass and be like ‘yo so our servers are in Panama so the RIAA will need the fucking Navy Seals with 50 calibre sniper rifles to take us down’ but it seems no-one is willing to harbour our file-sharing activities. The Dutch, the Swedes, all the sex-crazed marginal European countries. All these liberal motherfuckers. Gone. We’re not welcome. What do we do now?’

The Moon. With The PirateBay now back in full service on their .loon domain, the world is gearing up for the Moomins to start receiving cease and desist letters from the RIAA and Mr Spoon to be the public face of ‘the evils of file-sharing’.

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Moon-based Servers Only Hope for Bitorrent Trackers

With behavioural and contextual ad-targeting all the rage, the ability to demographically hyper-target white-supremacist, Ugly Betty fans on Facebook allows advertisers to present their wares to a perfectly grapefruit-segmented audience. Yet the Government have decided this is still not efficient enough to satisfy the priapic economist in Gordon Brown and now have decided just to buy the shit for you.

Models have never done it with Economists

Researchers at Microsoft have now claimed to have perfected a ‘really fucking badass’ segmentation model, so accurate that they can actually stop advertising  the products to you and instead have the ‘predicted optimal consumer purchase’ just delivered to your re-mortgaged flat at the correct point in your buying cycle.

“Why should advertisers have to rely on response rates? Why should they rely on your soft, spongy, unreliable brain to actually make decisions? Why can’t the Government just dock your pay and buy you ‘all that shit you want’ and ‘all the shit we know you want’.  You see, we are 99% sure that as a 28 year old male living in North West London, you are a jam-making, electropop-loving, mo-vembering Guardian reader with a long-lingering obsession with video games from your wasted childhood. You aren’t unique. There are nearly 100,000 identical drones in your segment to whom all will be delivered two cases of Beck Vier and a PS3 with a copy of Modern Warfare 2 precisely 1.3 weeks after launch”.

Clearly with state-intervention, the industries of ‘pointless shiny new electronic gadgets’ and ‘barely-different-from-last-season leather shoes’ will see rapid explosion. No longer will brand marketeers face the risk of a consumer having the classic ‘WTF reality-check’ just before clicking ‘Buy It Now’, or remembering they still haven’t paid back their mate last month for that AWESOME stag-do in Estonia and therefore wasting £150 on new pair of noise-cancelling headphones would be moronic folly.

TechChuff applauds such initiative and can’t wait for the mountains and mountains of cheap herbal viagra and fat-burning e-books to just start arriving at TechChuff HQ.

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State-Run Ad-Network to Buy Products on Your Behalf.