Month: October 2010
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Zero History by William Gibson
Zero History is an ideal book If you enjoyed William Gibson’s previous two works Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like the previous two books it dwells in the now, which is appropriate given Gibson’s oft quoted koan: ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’. I have written the review in terms of general…
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Sina Weibo microblogging service
China has its own unique ecosystem of web properties and Sina Weibo is the latest of them. It has a passionate blogging culture where some blogs by celebrities, experts and populist pundits can attract an audience of millions. Sina.com is a portal and blogging platform. They also have the most popular micro-blogging service. I thought…
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Size zero design
Size zero design What do I mean by size zero design? If you look at the product design of Apple’s most-hyped products: the Apple MacBook Air, the iPod Touch and the iPhone all have one attribute: being thin. I am picking on Apple just because they have some high-profile designs feature it and Steve Jobs…
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NFC + more news
NFC Digital Evangelist: What would I rather pick up my phone or my keys as I leave my house? – Ian on NFC. NFC or near field communications. Like most technologies NFC has been a long time coming. It sprang out of work that was done around RFID (radio frequency identification), where a passive device…
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Dopplr death & more news
Dopplr The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday…
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Bloglines RIP
Bloglines RIP to a well loved friend. On September 10, 2010 Ask announced that it was closing down Bloglines on October 1. On September 11, I removed my ‘subscribe to Bloglines‘ bookmarklet from the toolbar of my Firefox browser and closed my account for the last time after about six years of use – it…
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BlackBerry PlayBook
My friend David asked me what I thought of the BlackBerry Playbook. I wanted to give my ideas time to percolate before jotting them down: Sack the marketers – what does ‘professional-grade’ mean in with regards to a BlackBerry Playbook tablet? It’s the kind of weak nebulous marketing speak like ‘leading’, ‘best-of-breed’ and ‘solutions provider’.…