Nick Jones

I haven’t been blogging for a couple of days because I’ve been away on a long weekend vacation. We stayed in a Devon coastal town called Charmouth, in a charming boutique hotel in a building constructed in the 1500s by the local abbot, where King Charles II stayed in 1651 while escaping from Cromwell. The [...]

[Read more →]

I’m in Finland meeting clients and as you might expect the subject of mobile platforms and how to develop applications for them is a popular topic of conversation. But what’s also interesting is one of the topics that isn’t being mentioned – Java ME. Interest in ME seems to be declining amongst serious developers and [...]

[Read more →]

Moore’s law is wonderful, and is likely to remain so until about 2020 after which things may get interesting. But we don’t even have to wait till 2020; looking ahead just a few years our home PCs will have dozens of processor cores and somewhere between tens and hundreds of gigabytes of memory. So the [...]

[Read more →]

Regular readers will by now be used to my habit of getting tips on business strategy and prediction from the three cats who live in the Jones household. I like cats, but I don’t have many illusions about them. Cats flip from being predatory and selfish to cute and friendly, depending on who (or what) [...]

[Read more →]

On my way to a meeting in London this morning I was reading an article in CACM on computational advertising. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, computational advertising is what people like Google and Yahoo use to decide which advertisements to show you. The algorithms they use are as carefully guarded as the [...]

[Read more →]

Mobility is a battleground. Platforms, handsets, appstores, networks, media companies, software tools – to name but a few – are fighting to own a piece of the future. And many don’t even know what they’re fighting for, because the battle is as much about defining the future as owning it. And the sad fact about [...]

[Read more →]

After recent accidents caused by train and bus drivers who were texting while driving, the general manager of the Mass Bay Transit has banned drivers from carrying mobile devices while working. They will be prohibited from having a device in the cab of the train or bus, a driver could theoretically be dismissed just for [...]

[Read more →]

Reading between the lines of press releases is a popular hobby for analysts. We love trying to disentangle clues to future strategy from naive optimism and marketing waffle. Yesterday’s release from Clearwire and Cisco provided plenty of scope in this area.
First the optimism:
“…incorporating WiMAX into our products will help enable people to move freely throughout the [...]

[Read more →]

I love politicians because their interactions with technology are a perpetual source of entertainment. Today’s amusing snippet is from France where politicians have voted for a draconian law which allows the government to cut off internet access to people who repeatedly download pirated music and videos. There’s probably a serious discussion which should take place [...]

[Read more →]

I hate bad design. Bad design shows up in a lot of places, not just IT; badly designed products and processes are as frustrating as badly designed user interfaces. I’m sure one reason people get so enthusiastic about companies like Apple is because bad design is so common that good design is a novelty. Sad isn’t [...]

[Read more →]