Last week the BBC announced the launch of it’s iPlayer service for the Nintendo Wii, hot on the heels of iPhone and iPod touch support last month. It’s great to see the BBC supporting so many platforms just a couple of months after the launch of the service and addresses the irony of having iPlayer […]
Eight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it’s becoming easy to forget what I do and don’t own. I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of […]
When I first heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it was described to me as artificial-artificial-intelligence; the notion of wiring human intelligence into software is geekutopian, but strangely there are few great examples of mTurk applications…is this due to mTurk’s potentially severe challenge to labour laws? Yesterday, I undertook my first HIT (Human Intelligence Task), earning […]
The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives. Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness…just […]
I have an irritating habit – whenever I hear a three-letter acronym, my brain starts working on smutty, childish, innappropriate variations. Someone usually has to tell me to stop. In the last few minutes, Aaron and I ping-pong’d out the following from ‘LCD’… Lonely Cantankerous Drunk Lizard Cock Dunker Lovely Cock Deepthroater Lying Crap Distribution […]
Some random ideas that came out of a chat with Aaron yesterday… A variant of Terrapass that pays all contributions into an international publically owned and operated fund/trust/PAC for alternative energy issues. Smarter Buy It Now, Add To Shopping Basket, or Checkout buttons that show how much money you have in your account in a […]
About a year ago I read a pair of articles that got me thinking about how much time I spend online and whether I use that time productively… You There, at the Computer- Pay Attention Why I’m giving up broadband Coupled with the recent uptick in writing about the Attention Economy, I’ve noticed that there’s […]
Yes, yes – the 2.0 suffix is way overused. We (Orange) currently have 2.75m Livebox wireless routers installed in homes across Europe, with around 275’000 of those installed here in the UK. That looks like success, however we’re currently in the midst of a broadband price war; Sky, Orange and Carphone Warehouse have driven the […]
A few days ago, Winston Huang launched a pair of extensions for Firefox that let Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile customers see their remaining minutes from within their browser. That’s a great idea – but why aren’t Verizon and T-Mobile offering this capability themselves? Telcos need to open up a whole lot more. There’re two kinds […]
Back in January 2005, as Flickr and del.icio.us drove the adoption of tags, Brian Dear speculated (as did I) on the emergence of federated tagging; a Google for your tags – Taggle. Now, eighteen months later tags are everywhere – Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, Gmail, Vox, YouTube, Ning, Last.FM and our very own Simpatico, […]