Andy Murray has revealed he would like the chance to play mixed doubles with Laura Robson at the 2012 Olympics in London, after playing alongside the talented teenager during their closely-fought 2-1 victory against Kazakhstan at the Hopman Cup in Perth on Monday. “I’ll play mixed [at the
Posts Tagged ‘Robson’
Murray to mix it with Robson in 2012
January 6th, 2010 |
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Gazza’s ‘Iâ€m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!’ dreams lie in ruins
September 24th, 2009 |
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Former England footballer Paul Gascoigne could lose out on a place in the popular TV show ‘I”m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!’ after failing a psychology test.
According to reports, Gazza, who is suffering from alcoholism, depression,obsessive compulsive disorder and personal legal problems, was told that he was not mentally strong enough to participate [...]
Football honours Sir Bobby Robson
August 1st, 2009 |
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Leading figures from football have paid tribute to Sir Bobby Robson after his death at the age of 76 following a long battle with cancer.
Robson was a renowned and revered figure in football and led England to the World Cup semi-finals at Italia 90, where his side were agonisingly beaten on penalties by West Germany.
As a player, the wing-half had spells at Fulham and West Brom, while also winning 20 England caps.
He successfully moved into management, taking charge at Fulham, Ipswich, PSV Eindhoven, Sporting Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona and Newcastle in his coaching career.
Here, the football fraternity leads the tributes to Robson.
FORMER ENGLAND CAPTAIN BRYAN ROBSON
"He called me his Captain Marvel and it stuck for the rest of my playing career. It made me very proud but it was only typical of the respect he earned from myself and the rest of the dressing room.
"I have never come across anybody with such a passion for football. We had a tremendous personal relationship as manager and skipper.
"Any criticism he had of a player was kept very private and publicly he gave all of us his total backing.
"We stayed pretty close even towards the end and, along with many other friends, I enjoyed his company in Portugal playing in his Golf Classic. He will be missed by everybody who knew him."
MANCHESTER UNITED MANAGER SIR ALEX FERGUSON
"I was never too big or proud to ask him for advice which he gave freely and unconditionally. And I’m sure I am speaking for a lot of people when I say that.
"In my 23 years working in England there is not a person I would put an inch above Bobby Robson. I mourn the passing of a great friend, a wonderful individual, a tremendous football man and somebody with passion and knowledge of the game that was unsurpassed.
"His character was hewn out of the coal face, developed by the Durham mining background that he came from. His parents instilled in him the discipline and standards which forged the character of a genuinely colossal human being. He added his own qualities to that which then he passed on to his sons.
"The strength and courage he showed over the past couple of years when battling against his fifth bout of cancer was indescribable. Always a smile, always a friendly word with never a mention of his own problems.
"The world, not just the football world, will miss him. Let’s hope it won’t be long before another like him turns up because we could never get enough of them."
SCOTLAND MANAGER GEORGE BURLEY
"It was a big decision for me and my parents to make such a long journey at that age," said Burley, who played under Robson after leaving his home in Ayrshire to join Ipswich as a 15-year-old.
"But Sir Bobby was like a father to me, taking a personal interest in me right from the start, always checking whether I was happy. His support and enthusiasm was the perfect cure for homesickness and helped my career to get off the ground and thrive.
"I’ll never forget when in 1973, the day before we played Manchester United at Old Trafford, he took me to one side and told me I would be making my first-team debut. I was 17 and the player I had to mark just happened to be George Best.
"My parents came down from Scotland to watch the game and I remember him getting off the team bus and presenting them with two directors’ box tickets. We lost 3-0 but Sir Bobby was magnificent, telling me how well I’d played. It did wonders for my confidence.
"I went on to play over 500 games for Ipswich in a side that drew inspiration from its manager. From 1972 we qualified for European competitions nine out of 10 years which was remarkable considering the size of our squad and our standing as a small-town club.
"That was all down to his man-management, tactics and judgement. No finer example of that was when, after we won the FA Cup, he sold Brian Talbot to Arsenal for £450,000 and spent less than that to bring in that fabulous Dutch pair Arnold Muhren and Frans Thijssen.
"I could not possibly get my head round how my career would have gone had it not been for Sir Bobby Robson. I owe him everything and I only hope I can be guided by the example he showed me."
ENGLAND MANAGER FABIO CAPELLO
"Sir Bobby was a wonderful man, a real gentleman. I remember very well the times I managed my teams against him.
"The first time being when Bobby was manager of Barcelona and I was in my first season with Real Madrid. Later, when he was Newcastle manager and I was with Roma we faced each other – as opponents, but always friends.
"Of course, I recall Bobby as a manager with Ipswich, but more so with England. To manage the national team for so long was a remarkable achievement, and we all remember how close he came to leading England to the World Cup Final in Italy.
"He went on to enjoy success with PSV Eindhoven, Porto, Sporting Lisbon and Barcelona before returning to ‘home’ with Newcastle.
"Earlier this year I spent some time with Bobby when he opened the new cancer treatment centre, for which he worked so hard to raise funds. He was a fantastic man, and loved by so many people. His spirit and courage was incredible. To fight cancer so many times really showed the strength of the man.
"All the time we spoke over a cup of coffee with his close family, his passion for football shone through.
"He loved the game and was extremely proud of his country and the North East region.
"I also recall the tribute dinner the LMA [League Managers' Association] hosted for Bobby when he wasn’t planning to say more than a few words. In the end he stayed on the stage for a very long time, telling story after story, much to everyone’s amusement.
"It’s extremely sad that Sir Bobby has lost his final fight against cancer, but he will never be forgotten. He really was a great man."
FORMER NEWCASTLE CHAIRMAN FREDDY SHEPHERD
"It’s very sad, especially on Tyneside. The whole of Tyneside will be grieving. Sir Bobby Robson was a great man and will be sorely missed.
"I worked with him for five years every day. He was certainly the best manager I ever worked with at Newcastle. He never put me under pressure and always tried to see my side.
"He wouldn’t put up with fools and didn’t take any nonsense. He came across as a very kind guy but underneath was very tough. He thought about football 24 hours a day and he would ring me at all hours of the day and never stopped thinking about football."
FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT PRINCE WILLIAM
"I am deeply saddened to hear about Sir Bobby Robson’s death.
"His contribution to English football as a player, manager and superb ambassador for our national game has been immense.
"He will be sadly missed by football fans everywhere, and I am thinking about his family at this difficult time."
PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN
"I was extremely saddened to hear of the death of Sir Bobby Robson. I had the privilege of meeting Bobby on many occasions. He epitomised everything that is great about football in this country.
"His passion, patriotism, dedication and professionalism knew no equal during his time both as a player and a manager.
"His remarkable achievements as manager of Ipswich Town and then of England are among the most distinguished in English football history, and he was able to replicate that extraordinary success during his time at PSV Eindhoven, Porto and Barcelona.
"Over the past few years, he fought cancer with his characteristic tenacity and good humour.
"He will be sorely missed – not only in Newcastle and Ipswich, both of whom he served with such devotion, but by all sports fans in our country. My sincere condolences go to his wife Elsie and his family."</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Football legend Sir Bobby Robson dies
July 31st, 2009 |
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Former England manager Sir Bobby Robson has died at the age of 76.
More to follow.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Twitter, teenagers and tech trends
July 14th, 2009 |
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The world seems all a titter that teens don’t use Twitter
Was the whiz-kid correct? Two teens give opposing views
Teens spurning Twitter was one of the bombshells from 15-year-old Matthew Robson that the media highlighted in a report he wrote for investment bank Morgan Stanley.
However, it wasn’t really breaking news that teens don’t use Twitter.
• Last November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found the median age of Twitter users in the US was 31, higher than 26 for Facebook and 27 for MySpace.
• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.
In a battle of the teen prognosticators, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, writing on TechCrunch says that teens don’t use Twitter because it’s a completely open network and anyone can see your status updates. Teens prefer the privacy of closed networks such as Facebook. Brusilovsky said it makes teens feel “unsafe”.
It’s probably more about teens wanting to establish a privacy perimeter from the prying eyes of adults rather than a safety issue.
That’s not entirely true. Twitter users can protect their updates so only followers they approve can follow their updates.
Also, as David Meyer points out on ZDNet, Robson only referred to updating Twitter via SMS. However, as Meyer points out, Twitter is now used mostly via a range of desktop applications and internet apps on smartphones. Also, up until recently Twitter was MIA in the UK via SMS because Twitter and the carriers couldn’t reach an agreement on pricing.
A number of bloggers, including my wife Suw, took Morgan Stanley and the media to task for mistaking anecdotes from a 15-year-old for hard data.
Neither Morgan Stanley nor the media seem to be able to tell the difference between anecdote and data. This “research note” is more note than research, and it should not be taken to be representative of all teens. A teenager in a rural setting, or in an inner city estate, or one who feels socially excluded from web culture will have a very different experience than a teen who’s well-connected enough to get himself an internship at Morgan Stanley.
Beyond criticising Robson’s methodology, there is something more interesting going on here. As comScore’s Sarah Radwanick pointed out, as technology becomes more common, teens and college students aren’t the only people in the population that can be considered “technologically inclined”. She said:
…trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.
It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are “digital natives”. Charlie Beckett, director of journalism thinktank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native:
As Matthew Robson describes, most teenagers use a variety of digital devices, but when you talk to people who work with teenagers they describe a much more complex picture of what they actually do.
The same teenagers who have literacy problems have media literacy problems. Many of the teenagers apparently comfortable with new media are in fact only using a very limited range of applications and in a very limited way.
Other researchers indicate that teenagers are getting just as frustrated as the rest of us with the complexity and cost of many online and mobile applications.
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Twitter not for teenagers, says intern
July 13th, 2009 |
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Report on young people’s media habits written for investment bank by teenage intern causes huge interest in the City
A research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that described his friends’ media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.
The US investment bank’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, to write a report on teenagers’ likes and dislikes, which made the Financial Times’ front page today.
His report, that dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it”, said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley’s European media team.
“We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.” He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team’s usual research.
His colleague, Julien Rossi, added: “It’s an interesting starting point for debate.”
The rapid surge of interest in social networking and messaging sites has prompted speculation that sites such as Twitter or Facebook could be taken over. But Robson’s report, which was sent to Morgan Stanley’s clients as a research note last Friday, suggested that such a move could be folly. He said teenagers were using more and more media, but they were unwilling to pay for it.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
He warned that traditional media – television, radio and newspapers – are losing ground.
No teenager Robson knew reads a newspaper regularly since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV”. The only newspapers that are read are the cheaper tabloids and freesheets.
His peers are also put off by intrusive advertising so they prefer listening to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm to traditional radio. Teens see adverts on websites – pop ups, banner ads – as “extremely annoying and pointless,” Robson said. However, “most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content”.
He stressed that his peers were “very reluctant” to pay for music and most had never bought a CD, with a large majority downloading songs illegally from filesharing sites.
Money and time are instead devoted to cinema, concerts and video game consoles. Downloading films off the internet is not popular as the films are usually bad quality and have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a risk of viruses, Robson said.
Game consoles like Wii, which are now able to connect to the internet and offer free voice chat between users, have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.
His report came as media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This annual event is a chance for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to discuss the latest business and technology issues in a relaxed atmosphere.
When interviewed at the event, Murdoch appeared to rule out making a bid for the micro-blogging site Twitter. Asked if he was considering buying Twitter, Murdoch said, “No.” Asked about selling MySpace, he replied, “Hell no.”
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