So here's a thought, following a fascinating conversation with Diana Janicki from EMC at lunch today. Today's housing market in London is being governed to some extent by the first major social network - the train and underground service. Live closer to a station (mostly built before the end of the first decade in the … Continue reading Smart phones push up house prices
Category: Themes
At the recent Silicon Beach event I was lucky to be able to meet and chat with agency legend Andy Law. I didn't know he was an agency legend until talking to him (man - for most of the time Andy's been in the agency world, I was nestled in the world of tech). … Continue reading Implosion
In the early 1960s American social scientist Stanley Milgram ran a series of now infamous experiments into obedience in humans. What he found was that we are surprisingly, and shockingly, influenced to do things that would otherwise not be in our nature by very little in the way of social authority. In his work, … Continue reading The internet made me do it
Another day, another smart device vendor emerges (as a few more disappear). Today Tesco announce that they are throwing themselves into the tablet market with their low-priced Hudl device. The seven-inch Android device goes on sale at the end of the month, and one can only hope that alongside the four colours available at … Continue reading Underlying motivations
At the weekend I spent some time observing my eldest child Oscar try to navigate his way around the CBeebies website on a computer with mouse and keyboard. It was a painful experience. The touchpad on the laptop (a Samsung Chromebook) was beyond his comprehension and dexterity. The full-sized mouse cumbersome and his little fingers … Continue reading The end of WIMP
Some things from fiction come true: Arthur C Clarke and satellites, for example. Or the surveiled society depicted in Orwell's 1984. Others don't: where are the hover boards? There is a vogue for transparent devices in depictions of the future at the moment. As illustrated by the picture on the front of a Guardian advertising … Continue reading Transparent tablets? Really?!
I've just started reading the draft of Matt Baxter-Reynold's forthcoming book Death of the PC after I had a fascinating conversation with Matt earlier this week. It's got me thinking about how the "post-PC" devices that Matt talks about, whilst the next in line along the evolution of computing devices (in which mainframe begat mini begat … Continue reading Confluence
Another day, another enormous public-sector IT project disaster getting news coverage. This time, the abandoned NHS systems project that has cost us all £10Bn so far. "All" of course being unless you are a shareholder in one of the companies involved, in which case you're probably at worst neutral on the deal. "Richard Bacon, a … Continue reading The problem with projects
I'm trying to pull together some consistent terminology to describe different types of social networking behaviour that manifests in the way people use the services in a work and not-work context. I'm looking for some feedback on the structure illustrated above, which maps the amount of activity someone has in the social network space against … Continue reading Social tribes
A few days ago I wrote a nostalgia-tinged piece tracing my life through mobile phones - some 15 years now of device use and ownership. It got me thinking that tracing my life through actual computers would be a far harder game - partly because it's over a longer period of time, and partly because … Continue reading My life in PCs
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