Nick Jones

Peter Cochrane just wrote a piece in his silicon.com blog about the death of DRM. Which set me thinking because although DRM might be dying – and I sincerely hope it is  – I have a feeling that we are going to see lots more battles of this type.
Money, music and images have already shaken [...]

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Mobile World Congress is looming and is a venue at which lots of vendors announce their latest shiny new products. As a result I suspect there is a lot of agonising and maybe some internal political infighting going on in a few vendors at this moment. Products such as new handsets have a long gestation [...]

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Sorry to be fixated about the economy in the last few posts, but it’s a topic that’s on everyone’s mind at the moment. A few days ago George Monbiot writing in a UK paper – The Guardian – was talking about the fact that in the past people have experimented with alternative currencies in difficult [...]

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People who watch insider purchases of shares note that company directors tend to perform well when the market is rising but they – like everyone else – often lose money in a falling market. There could be many reasons for this. Experience – many executives haven’t been through a serious recession before; the fixation on [...]

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Some of the most interesting research and the coolest new products are in the user interface area. For example I just love Oblong’s G-Speak gestural control system which is the closest thing to “Minority Report” around today. If you haven’t yet seen it take a look at some of the YouTubes of Oblong being used [...]

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Stop being defensive about mobile email! As a mobile enthusiast I’m saddened that so many people find it necessary to apologise for it. I see far too many email tag lines like the following:
Sent from a mobile device, I blame any deficiencies on that
From my wireless handheld, please excuse the typos
My first reaction to these [...]

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My daughter’s laptop just expired with a few plaintive beep codes saying its graphics adapter was dead. Buried in the rant about unreliable technology and the sound of a dead laptop being kicked was an interesting comment – she said: “but it’s only four years old”. Now I’m from a techno-infatuated generation; In the zeitgeist [...]

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Anyone in the prediction business should own a few cats, because they perpetually remind you of some important principles.
Firstly, your expectations of the future can be derailed very quickly by unexpected events. At 7:00 this morning I was sipping my first coffee of the day and foresaw a relaxed half hour involving more coffee and [...]

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Sometimes vendors do things which I just don’t understand. The latest is Gemalto – a security vendor – who just sent me an email proudly announcing their new consumer web site which claims to provide information for the 73 percent of US consumers who they claim don’t know where to go for information on digital [...]

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Some years ago I read a great book called “why we buy” by Paco Underhill which was all about retail consumer behaviour. It could equally well have been titled “men shop on Mars, women shop on Venus”, because the behaviour of the sexes is so different.
I am an unashamed, unreformed male shopper. I go into [...]

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