Nick Jones

An interesting working draft just emerged from W3C for something called EmotionML- Emotion Markup Language. The goal is to provide a framework for annotating information with human emotions. There is a clear need for some form of EmotionML, especially in the area of context where future mobile devices will provide lots of clues to our [...]

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I needed a Windows 7 PC, but like many home CIOs I’d refused to let Vista into my house so had no upgrade path for any of the existing machines. So I begged the home CFO (aka wife) who reluctantly allowed me to go and buy the parts to build a new PC. I don’t [...]

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One of my colleagues just commented that people are frequently telling him to act his age. Another Californian colleague once remarked that one of the great things about growing up was that you could roller blade around your kitchen without anyone complaining. This started me thinking about age; we do a lot of surveys looking [...]

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I spent several hours roaming around the London Symbian show SEE 2009 yesterday. SEE is a rather unfocussed event, the exhibitors range from companies selling mobile virtualisation and low level touch screen IP through testing tools all the way up to consultancies wanting to build high level applications. SEE really needs to decide whether it’s [...]

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One of the interesting things I can do as a Gartner analyst is to mine some of the data that we collect from our web site. I just trawled through the anonymised search strings for the July to September quarter and in the mobile / communications domain the topic people were searching for information on [...]

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Symposium is over and it’s time to share a few of the impressions from my many discussions with clients and vendors.
Everyone is busy. In the wireless and mobile space my overwhelming impression was one of purposeful activity. Most people wanted to discuss projects that were either under way or imminent. Wireless technology hasn’t yet caught [...]

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It’s the end of the 2nd day here at Symposium and I’ve delivered three presentations and probably chatted with 50 clients about mobile and wireless issues; and I’ve noticed a real change from last year. I won’t call it optimism yet, because everyone is still suffering from budget cuts and uncertainty. But last year the [...]

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If you’re thinking about developing a customer-facing mobile application running on your favourite platform, maybe iPhone or RIM, I have one question for you. Do you actually know how many of your customers are using that platform?
Looking at the client meetings already scheduled in my diary for Symposium week I see a fair number are [...]

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I’m in Orlando for Gartner’s US Symposium and ITxpo where I’ll be talking about mobile / wireless trends and mobile collaboration / social networking. Symposium is held at the Disney resort which means I’m staying in a Disney hotel where there’s no escape from the Disney Magic. Hash browns plus Goofy at 8AM on a [...]

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The mobile device world seems to be populated with companies driven by what Alan Greenspan once called irrational exuberance. One example is Mobinnova who’ve announced a netbook running Windows CE powered by Nividia’s new Tegra chipset.
Leaving aside the question of whether the world actually needs yet another netbook, the choice of Windows CE is bizarre [...]

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