Nick Jones

Gartner hype cycles are a consequence not so much of technology but human reactions to it. And such reactions are depressingly consistent, which is why hype cycles work so well. But after a while annoyance sets in. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a voluntary industry-wide moratorium on topics where the signal to noise ratio [...]

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Mobile barcodes are a technology which has seemed on the edge of adoption forever. Technically there doesn’t seem too much difficulty in reading a barcode using a camera phone, but business models, usability of reader applications, and integration with m-business processes seem to lag. Handset manufacturers haven’t really helped either, a number of Nokia handsets have [...]

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We all hope the current outbreak of swine flu doesn’t become a pandemic. But as my colleagues have already pointed out in other posts it’s important to have pandemic contingency plans that define what you’d do if workforce absenteeism rates exceeded 40% or you had to close offices. And as you develop and refresh those [...]

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Yesterday I was in Glasgow talking with people about the state of mobile industry. One of the topics that came up – naturally enough – was iPhone. iPhone is a wonderful device and has redefined people’s expectations of the mobile web experience, but I worry that too many developers are carried away by a fatal [...]

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I’ve spent the day at an Intel meeting listening to their plans for chips, netbooks, laptops and all things mobile. However one of the non-mobile topics that also got a lot of airtime was internet enabled TVs, for which (unsurprisingly) Intel have chipsets. Now I think the idea of a TV that can access the [...]

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Yesterday I had another discussion which has become rather too frequent recently; it starts something like this: “we’re going to mobilise our web site, how should we do it….”
My first reaction is to try to understand the goal of the exercise, so I usually ask a pile of questions which go something like: “why are [...]

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The Oracle announcements talked a lot about Solaris, integrated systems including hardware and software, and enterprise opportunities but not much about mobility. This may be significant because Oracle’s relationship with mobile has been a bit lightweight in the past. But this acquisition could have significant implications for the mobile world. It raises lots of interesting [...]

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This is turning into a year of great escapes. The Symbian Foundation blog reported a few days ago that Symbian had escaped from handsets and had been ported to an Intel Atom motherboard. Android also escaped and was demonstrated on a netbook earlier this year. Linux escaped long ago from PCs and pops up all [...]

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The UK government has just announced it will subsidise electric cars. This is probably a good thing, all we need now is a technology to generate the energy from one of the UKs over-abundant natural resources like clouds or rain. But seriously, if the UK government succeeds in converting lots of Brits to electric travel [...]

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I regularly play with a lot of cool mobile gadgets and applications, so it’s a salutary experience to be reminded just how bad mobility can be in the real world. Yesterday my wife and I were driving down from Scotland to London, so I naturally wanted some traffic information. I was using a Nokia 5800 [...]

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