Nick Jones

For some reason several clients have asked me about m-learning recently so I have just written a note for Gartner on what’s happening in this space. To date most m-learning has been developed by academics. Hardly surprising, they’re experts in learning, they’re paid to experiment, and they have thousands of willing victims (students) to experiment [...]

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Today Apple was criticised by the UK advertising standards authority (ASA) for an advertisement that provided an unrealistic impression of iPhone 3G performance. Thinking back, unrealistic, confusing, or downright dangerous mobile advertising seems like a fairly common event. E.g. descriptions like  “unlimited broadband”,  “high speed”, “free SMS”, “unlimited calls” and commercials showing people using mobiles [...]

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Yet another top level domain is poised to launch – .tel. This is a weird concept where key contact information such as phone numbers and URLs is stored directly in the DNS and accessed as a .tel domain. Yes, yet another definitive central location for all your information to join your .com, your .mobi, your [...]

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Last Thursday was World Philosophy Day, and I hope you’re all grateful that I resisted the temptation to blog about the philosophy of mobility and the mobility of philosophy. Philosophers delight in constructing hypothetical situations to illustrate moral dilemmas, e.g. Is killing people bad? Probably, although, as Gilbert & Sullivan said, I have a little [...]

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I’m a fan of the Open Symbian initiative, because I think it should encourage some new manufacturers to create Symbian handsets, which will be good for the Symbian ecosystem.  However I think everyone wishes it would happen a bit faster, at the speed this business moves 2010 is a long way away.
One of the challenges [...]

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Every analyst should read science fiction. The first and obvious reason is that the best SF writers like Banks, Stevenson and Gibson have already done a lot of thinking about the future, so anyone interested in predicting it should tap into their ideas.
The second reason is that SF has fashions like everything else. Academics have [...]

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Anyone who’s heard me talk at Gartner conferences probably knows by now that I believe that human beings are basically motivated by only four things: Sex, Fear, Greed and Chocolate. (SFGC) Such  human motivations are a long, long way away from wireless technology and silicon chips. So I am inevitably cynical when I see a [...]

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I work from home a lot because London commuting is a pain, and most of my clients and fellow analysts are scattered around the world so face to face meetings are rare. Fortunately I just got official authorisation from the home facilities manager (aka wife) to move my home office into a larger room. So [...]

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Some of our recent research suggests that young people just aren’t cooperating; they’re not behaving as “digital natives” should. Many of them are very pragmatic, interested in important things like meeting and dating, but they don’t want to become classic digital natives immersed in technology and expert in its use. They just want technology that [...]

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As regular readers know, we do a lot of focus group research into mobile consumers and habits.  Well here’s a fascinating snippet from a recent French focus group. I thought everyone in the universe wanted an iPhone because of its stellar usability, unique multi-touch interface and the rich application store. I am so wrong it’s [...]

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