Compare and contrast, if you will, the average purchasing processes for two different sorts of technology in many businesses today: Mobile telephony services have become truly commoditised. Organisations select on the basis of price and perceived value (handsets on offer, consulting services and so on). Rarely does quality of service come into it: I've known … Continue reading Trust and precedence
Category: Themes
I've become slightly obsessed with the distinction between social networks and social media. I don't know if I'm the only one, but it strikes me that social media is what organisations tend to do, whilst the advantage of all this wonderful technology to us as individuals lies in social networks. Networking is what us humans do. Well, some … Continue reading Why network?
Charles Arthur flagged an interesting article by Richard Chirgwin on The Register about the weird worldview that the Google Nest Internet of Things house has about it's occupants. Put simply, it really struggles to understand that there might be more than one person living in a house. If you use online services and you are … Continue reading Groups think
We love to predict the future. Predicting the future reduces our uncertainty. It reduces ambiguity. And it's often wrong. Predicting the future comes in many forms. There are the seers and guides who issue pronouncements, whether it's that the world will end a week on Friday, or that 2015 will be the year of Wearable Nano … Continue reading Repeatable, predictable
About six years ago I started to look at the options to introduce "Bring your own device" thinking into my then employer, the global marketing agency Imagination. It shows how quickly the world moves, because this was just before the BYOD moniker came into fashion and certainly before any of the big technology vendors had … Continue reading Bring Any Device
A New Year and a new online security scandal - this time involving purveyors of customised greetings cards and irritating advertising jingles, Moonpig.com. Well, I say "new online security scandal" - apparently this one has been around since August 2013 and involves an insecure API which allows just about anyone to post orders on behalf of … Continue reading Technical debt, MVPs and an irritating jingle
In the summer I started to use the LinkedIn publishing service to cross-post things from my own blog onto the business social network. Although the editing tools are a bit ropey, and the reporting non-existent, people seem to be commenting on LinkedIn articles a lot more than on my own site (mostly I guess because I've … Continue reading The Top Posts of 2014 – Part 3
With news this morning about how BT are looking to acquire EE, I've been having conversations with a few people recently about the point of telephones in this day and age. There's an awful lot of assumption and learned behaviour associated with these devices, and the continued existence of telephones (desk-based ones in particular) is today … Continue reading Why do we need phones?
Back in January I caught up with Mark Chillingworth for a cup of coffee at the British Library. Mark is Editor in Chief of CIO Magazine in the UK, and one of the upshots of that meeting was that he asked if I would start contributing a column to his online service. On January 20th … Continue reading The Top Posts of 2014 – Part 2
The shutdown of airspace across the UK at the end of last week raised an issue that's been bouncing around in my head for a while: that we have long since reached a point where the systems which we have developed, and the interconnections between those systems are too complex for us to understand. From what … Continue reading Failing gracefully
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