Nick Jones

One hot topic at our Chicago conference this week was mobile platforms. Sifting through all the platform discussions there seemed to be several underlying themes:
B2C applications. Enterprises developing mobile apps for consumers are in a no-win situation because they have to trade off quality / usability for audience size. E.g. SMS works on everything but [...]

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I’m finishing an exhausting three days here in cold and windy Chicago where Gartner’s mobile and wireless conference has just ended. It’s hard for many of our clients to get authorisation for travel and conference expenses in the current economy, so although the attendee numbers were down on last year there was one huge benefit. [...]

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We live in a society dominated by instant gratification where long term thinking is unfashionable. And while I am personally a big fan of instant gratification, I also appreciate that a failure to think about the long term can be as fatal to a business as a failure to turn in good results next quarter. [...]

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One of my colleagues recently forwarded me a link to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox posting on mobile usability. Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert who recently decided to test the usability of web sites accessed on mobile devices. Unsurprisingly he concluded that usability was awful and websites should provide special mobile versions. Duh.
I must confess Nielsen’s [...]

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It’s nice to know that the British tradition of reluctant and inadequate customer service isn’t dead. I’m planning to visit some clients in Sheffield later this week and thought that maybe for a change I’d take the train. So I dived into the East Midlands Trains web site to find out about fares and timetables. [...]

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Nokia now has an app store. But so does pretty much everyone else. In fact Nokia has three app stores – a music store, an nGage games store and now an Ovi store. Confused? Me too. I don’t see why a music track and a music video should come from different stores. Or why a [...]

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There seem to be a few themes already emerging in the PR from vendors and the GSMA itself at Mobile World Congress. Environmental issues, wireless broadband and application stores seem high on everyone’s list. Clearly the ultimate alignment with this year’s GSM zeitgeist would be a press release announcing a green wireless broadband app store, [...]

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This year I was privileged to be one of the judges in the GSM awards category for the best use of mobile for social and economic development. No, I can’t tell you who won; that’s a secret until the awards dinner next week. But many of the entries in this category were from emerging markets, [...]

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There is something which I despise and detest whose perpetrators deserve every excruciating punishment known to man including keelhauling, the rack and being tied down and forced to watch a decade of Welsh soap opera. The crime of which I speak is failure to use common sense, basic physics and simple arithmetic.
For example, remember those press reports [...]

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Microsoft just announced the beta of a new web service called MyPhone which backs up your handset’s contact list, photos etc. You can also access the contacts and calendar on the web and they will be synchronised back to the handset. However, based on the information on the public web site, I don’t think this [...]

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