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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Some impressions from Nokia World today. Firstly what’s looking good? Location technology and the mashable map player are top of my list of announcements that will have a major long term impact. Location is a powerful foundation on which a lot of clever applications will be built. Nokia’s first demonstration of this is “lifecasting”  which [...]

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One of the persistent delusions of the mobile industry is the “three screen” vision (or maybe hallucination). This is the assumption that consumers like us will want to watch similar content on our TV, PC and mobile phone. I can see why network operators and media companies love the idea because it would be so [...]

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It’s nice to be popular, and over the next few years you’re going to become very sought-after. Sadly however It won’t be because you’re cool, witty, handsome or pretty (see, no expense is spared in this blog, you even get rhymes). It will be because there will be a big fight to own your mobile [...]

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The latest organisation to be infected by the app store pandemic is LG who are reported to be opening their own store this week. I’m rather sceptical about app stores from handset vendors like LG and Samsung or even some of the network operator app stores, because I think they’re missing the point. App stores [...]

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The UK government is just about to announce a smart metering program which could see the replacement of 48 million electricity and gas meters by 2020. In principle I like the idea, but my inner cynic is worried. This will be a huge project sponsored by government and implemented by private sector energy companies. This is [...]

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I was writing an email to a client about mobile and open source this morning, and as I jotted down some statistics I got to wondering: has open source failed the mobile industry? 
(note to self after reading that sentence, stop sounding like ‘sex and the city’)
The overall stats aren’t impressive. Take Sourceforge for example. Out of [...]

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One of the things which worries me about the combination of SOA and cloud computing is that in the future we will have many “systems” which are a complex web of networked distributed hosted services involving many providers. Basically no-one will know the system architecture, no-one will know where the pieces of the system are [...]

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