Nick Jones

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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Creating standards is a painful and tedious process, and sometimes you just can’t wait. So one alternative is to form a consortium of allies to support a new technology and create a de-facto standard. This is a popular strategy in the wireless world, for example Bluetooth emerged this way. There are several interesting wireless alliances [...]

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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 [...]

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I’m off to Germany tonight for a few days to attend Nokia World in Stuttgart so I’ll try to post some comments on some of the announcements and devices I see there. In the meantime a few thoughts on events of the last few days.
The EU invests EUR 18M in LTE-A. A few days ago [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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There must be a language somewhere in the world which uses the same word for “parent”, “banker” and “taxi driver”, because as any parent knows these are basically the same job. Even children admit this, some years ago when my daughter was still living at home she bought me a T-shirt with the slogan “Bank [...]

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Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP, was quoted on the BBC web site commenting that he felt the UK was sliding towards becoming a police state partly because of our growing and uncontrolled use of surveillance technology such as CCTV, face recognition and number plate recognition. We have certainly gone overboard on this stuff, its [...]

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There’s a big technological deficiency in mobile phones. They desperately need better location sensing. There are already over a dozen ways to locate a mobile phone, which Bill Clark and I discussed when we wrote a research note on the topic a while back, so you might wonder why we need more. However, the problem is [...]

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