How long will we still use the terms "mobile" and "phone"? It's a question that's come to mind as I read Charles Arthur's book Digital Wars, which is an entertaining view of the last 10 years or so of corporate competition between Google, Microsoft and Apple.In many ways, the term seems outdated. Most computing devices … Continue reading Nomenclature
Category: General
One of the other threads that came up in my conversation with Tim Dunn earlier in the week was around the topic of APIs. One of the most significant technical developments that has accompanied the growth of consumer/social technology services in recent years has been how so much of it has been powered by openly … Continue reading APIs everywhere…
I had a very useful catch up today with Tim Dunn who is Director of Strategy at Isobar Mobile. We covered off a number of subjects, but one thing that came out towards the end of the conversation was a new reason for why one might build an app, rather than a website (following on … Continue reading Intrinsic value
Achievements on my 52nd week at Microsoft included: - trained up in how to deal with journalists (about bloomin' time, some may argue) - getting the slides together for the ITDF presentation (not due for a month, but with holidays and so on there's no time like the present) - great conversations with devs attending … Continue reading Weeknote 93: first anniversary
Putting aside views on the political sense behind senior government members' recent comments on the potential fuel tanker driver strike, it's interesting that the net result seems to have been a real-world incarnation of the classic game theory model, The Prisoner's Dilemma. The game, created in the 1950s by game theorists at RAND, goes something … Continue reading The prisoners’ petrol dilemma
There's a good post from a recent acquaintance Colin MacAndrew that I read this morning that challenges what appears to be the currently held world view that the only way to develop software is in an agile framework, and any agile project that fails is down to the execution, not the method. Colin talks about … Continue reading Avoiding “stupider, faster”…
I spent this morning in a great little training session looking at preparing for and being interviewed by the media. One of the things that struck me was how tech companies have been responsible for seismic change in the media industry in the past two decades. My first experience of Media Training was in the last … Continue reading Media + Technology
I was at a party to celebrate a couple of friends' 40th birthdays on Saturday night at a bar in North London, and Chris (one of the birthday boys, and someone I've known since school) asked if I would DJ for a bit. I was never a "DJ" DJ, but in my 20s spent many … Continue reading The consumerisation of the DJ booth
There was coverage on this week's Material World programme on Radio 4 about some recently published research from Northwestern University into behaviours seen on reverse auction internet sites. It showed that (from analysis of a mass of publically available data) that just about everyone who takes part in such auctions (where a relatively high-value item … Continue reading Marginal value
In talking yesterday about the challenges of keeping our living room clean, it got me thinking about the incredibly competitive battle that seems to be revolving around control of the screen that, still, most people spend most time in front of - the television. There's been lots of talk from Microsoft over recent years about the … Continue reading The third screen
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