Microsoft UK's token Long Hair, Dave Coplin, spoke at Research Now last week about how new technology is forcing new social rules for how we interact and engage with each other. His example, from his experiences of family snapshots last summer, is when someone proffers you their mobile phone to show you a photo from their … Continue reading Techiquette*
Category: Themes
The social networks are all aglow with news of the next generation of wearable computing. Will Apple release an iWatch? What's the latest on Google Glass? Will someone be releasing digital underpants, and will they be touch-enabled? (There's a new spin on the internet of Things...) I don't know if I'm getting increasingly Luddite as … Continue reading Staring into the middle distance
So, a few weeks into my hot-desking life, and it turns out that there are two reasons why I'm might put my back out. The first reason is obvious: arriving at a new work space each morning, the rigmarole of adjusting chairs, laptop stands, screens and all to allow for a comfortable working position becomes an … Continue reading Hot-desking: the osteopath’s dream
The late Steve Jobs used to talk about how Apple sat at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. I wonder, though, the extent to which technology is a precursor to new forms of art: whether photography, cinema, radio, television or now networked computing, it tends to be that technology comes first, and then art … Continue reading How technology creates art
At last week's Research Now event, there was a fascinating, and sometimes quite touching, presentation from Richard Banks, who is an interaction designer with Microsoft Research. Richard talked about his work looking at producing physical objects that will enable people to reflect and reminisce about digital artifacts in ways analogous to how photo albums and … Continue reading Digital flotsam
On most corporate email systems, not to mention social networks, there's usually the opportunity to upload a photo of yourself. The photos that people put into these things tend to fall into one of four categories: nothing; a face shot; a picture other than just a portrait; and a photo of something else - varying … Continue reading Why you should always upload your photo…
LinkedIn, or Facebook for boring people, is celebrating it's 200 millionth subscriber by informing people who sit in the top 1% of viewed profiles and top 5% of viewed profiles of that exciting news. I fall in the 1%. Which tells me a few things... Firstly, that "top 1%" sounds an awful lot better than … Continue reading One in 2 million: my part in the LinkedIn story
OK, so something of a attention-grabbing headline, but let me explain... I recently saw an interesting post by Geoffrey Moore, he of Crossing the Chasm fame. In it he argued that the consumer IT boom has peaked, and that the next five to seven years will see the most interesting developments happening in the Enterprise … Continue reading Nobody should be building Enterprise solutions these days…
There are two unrelated news stories in the UK press this morning that have got me thinking about how it appears we need a really big crisis before change is easy to instigate. On the one hand there is the terrible story of organisational mismanagement in the NHS in the midlands, and on the other … Continue reading Change from crisis
There is a good article that I picked up on over the weekend from November on Forbes looking at the intersection of responsive web design and mobile device apps. The responsive design movement is one which is founded on, in my view, a quite technical foundation: websites should be built in such a way that … Continue reading Contextual design
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