- Why doesn’t my TV talk to the remote
It’s not really fair. My TV (and every other piece of home electronics) is a slave to a remote. But because the remote only barks out orders and never asks questions, or listens, it’s a cause for frustration. We have a Logitech Harmony remote, and it’s a great thing. But because the communication is one-way it’s often as frustrating an experience using it as trying to find the right one of the half dozen remotes scattered around the living room. Now, imagine a world where every TV, Xbox, Squeezebo
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
- Zynga – aiming for a stronger social graph than Facebook or Twitter?
Zynga are the company behind some of the run-away games hits of Facebook – Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville etc. Through a combination or addictive game-play and peer-pressure they have grown to be a significant player in the gaming space. They have spread from their beginnings in Facebook to hosting games on Yahoo and MySpace and launched native iPhone (and iPad) versions – but in call cases “your” Farm is independent of the underlying social networking platform. Now with Google
Monday, July 12, 2010
- Scenes of Scheme’s San Francisco
Robin Sloan wrote a book and then Emily Cooper remixed it to produce some amazing 3D renderings You can enjoy them in their original goodness or get a glimpse here if you have Silverlight installed. To navigate around drag and drop using your mouse or you can select an individual image from the drop-down in the top left hand corner. Zoom in and out using the -/+ icons or your mouse wheel and you can select the full screen experience using the icon in the top right hand corner (just press [Esc] to go back
Monday, March 22, 2010
- Silverlight Install and Logging Framework
So, you\'ve just created a great Silverlight application and you want everyone to enjoy it. You, of course, have the Silverlight runtime already installed but what about users who don\'t have a current version of Silverlight or, worse, are on an unsupported platform? You could leave them with the standard silverlight.js experience but, let\'s be honest, it\'s probably not going to reflect that well against the carefully crafted user experience of your application is it? That said, you\'ve got deadlines and dev
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
- Wind Blown
Okay. this is quite a departure for me. I don’t normally get the urge to write these days and when I do I don’t feel it’s good enough to share publically but this… well, it just felt like it wanted to get out. So please enjoy. Comments welcome (be gentle) – hopefully they will inspire some improvements (but I probably won’t be giving up my day job any time soon). Image credit: Amy Kane As I move slowly along the beach I can feel the wind from the sea trying to blow me from my path. T
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
- With great power comes great responsibility
Reading this you’re probably consuming electricity. Your computer, the lights, heating or air conditioning. If you’re in your offices there are probably one or two things plugged in that you’re not using at the moment. At home it’s probably even worse… and when the only real visibility you have is your monthly bill it’s pretty tough to actually do anything about it. Luckily there are a number of solutions starting to ramp up that will help the typical homeowner to get a better understanding of
Sunday, January 10, 2010
- Personal Health Records and the Individual
There’s a lot of talk in the US and other countries about the moment about Health Reform and how Personal Health Records (PHR) aka Electronic Health Records (EHR) from the like of Microsoft (HealthVault), Google (Google Health) and others (e.g. Dossia) are going to make things more efficient. Sadly in a lot of cases the people they seem to make more efficient for are the Hospital Administrators and Insurance companies who’ve done a good job of letting costs spiral out of control to improve their share
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
- The opportunity cost of bad service
Providing customer service costs money. Providing good customer service takes commitment and money. Money to hire the right people, commitment to provide a good level of service and learn from what your customers are telling you, and more money to actually do something about it. What does indifferent customer support cost? While it doesn’t hit your bottom line today it’s going to have an impact when the customer doesn’t come back or shares a negative opinion and you lose business. I know how tough i
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
- Can ordinary users make money on Twitter?
Blogging has been great for a lot of folks as residual income from Amazon or ads at least covers the hosting and beer money. As more people move to micro-blogging with services like Twitter the question has turned to how people (including Twitter themselves) can make money on these services. Ad.ly like to think that they have an answer with sponsored tweets – though delivering one every couple of days at a buck a tweet (and a $50 minimum payout) it’s probably going to be a while before they see their
Monday, December 14, 2009
- Annabel Scheme
A few weeks ago I came across a really intriguing short story and an even more intriguing idea… The idea was simple. If Robin could raise enough pledges to buy the story he would write and publish a book. It seemed like a great idea so I made a pledge – partly out of curiosity, partly because I really enjoyed the short story and wanted to read more and partly because I really like the idea of independent artists making it without needing big business. Robin quickly raised the minimum and set out to c
Friday, December 11, 2009
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