Nick Jones

I’ve been chatting to a client about m-government today and while doing so I started to wonder whether m-government is a meaningful concept, or even whether it actually exists. Sure, there are lots of mobile applications developed by government, but in 90% of cases the technologies and drivers for G2C or G2E mobile apps seem [...]

[Read more →]

I’m rushing around to get all my outstanding jobs finished before I go on vacation next week. I’ve travelled around Europe a lot in the last few decades and while doing so I’ve driven alongside the Rhine or crossed the Rhine more times than I can remember. But I have never actually been on the [...]

[Read more →]

App stores are a discovery machine. We throw millions of developers with hundreds of millions of ideas into a melting pot, filter their efforts through tens of millions of users and somewhere along the way we find out what humans actually want to do with smartphone applications. Its a form of crowdsourcing, an internet idea [...]

[Read more →]

Sorry to re-open this topic but the marketing people out there are getting more irresponsible every day and need to be restrained. Preferably using chains. What’s really bugging me this week is the gratuitous use of the term “4G”. For me 4G has to comply with the ITU definition of a technology providing a peak performance of [...]

[Read more →]

I’m giving a presentation this week at our London PCC conference where I’ll be talking about the future of mobile work, particularly in the areas of communication and collaboration. One of the things I do when creating such presentations is to take a look at what some of the academics are doing, because a lot [...]

[Read more →]

As you may have noticed I’m a bit of a netbook and MID sceptic, and not only because I still haven’t found a manbag in which to carry one. As Gary Woodill pointed out in a comment on my blog last week one of the big problems with netbooks is that they’re under-specified, under-powered and [...]

[Read more →]

I was chatting today with some Intermec guys who were showing me their latest ruggedized handhelds. These are wonderful mobile devices, you can throw them across the room, pour coffee on them, and even drive a car over them and they can still make a phone call and read a barcode. This is a market [...]

[Read more →]

I’m encouraged by the suggestions that ASUS may release a low cost two screen e-book reader in Europe. However, despite this I’m still not going to sell all my bookcases and go electronic. One reason is I just worked out that I can’t afford it. Let’s do some sums here…..
First the cost of e-books. A [...]

[Read more →]

One of the challenges netbooks face is that they are portable but not pocketable; or more precisely they are pocketable only for the rather small subset of people with a deeply challenged fashion sense. This is a serious problem because the more time a gadget spends in your presence the more likely you are to [...]

[Read more →]

Perhaps the most important skill for a politician is to understand society and the forces that mould it, one of which is technology. But politician’s understanding of the intersection of technology and society remains tragically poor as is illustrated by a couple of UK examples.
Disconnecting file sharers. The UK government has acted against the recommendations [...]

[Read more →]