Many thanks to mobile guru Tomi Ahonen, who was kind enough to forward me some extracts from his Almanac 2010. The Almanac collects together data about the mobile industry worldwide. If you aren’t already switched on to Tomi, I’d very much recommend anyone interested in this field to check out his publications and also the [...]
January 14, 2010
Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in [...]
January 11, 2010
I’ve just installed the Wordpress Mobile Pack, a free set of plug-ins that format, edit and compress your blog so that it works better for mobile users. It switches to the mobile version on-the-fly as it detects the user agent (browser) used. There’s a link to the mobile version in the sidebar, if you want [...]
October 10, 2008
As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day – 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair. One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, [...]
May 24, 2008
This post is a follow-up to the last, rather less complimentary one, Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated… At 10am this morning – and it’s Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, you’ll note, I got a call from Sarah, a customer services manager at Carphone Warehouse. She gets Google Alerts for mentions of the company’s [...]
May 23, 2008
NB: This story has a happy ending! Dear Carphone Warehouse, We used to have it so good. I’ve been a customer for about four years, and you’ve never put a foot wrong until now. You found me good deals and gave me good advice on tariffs and handsets. But I’m not sure our relationship can recover after [...]
November 1, 2006
Got my mobile phone stolen by some pasty-faced charver who approached me for a cigarette while I was sat outside a cafe in Richmond. Giving fags to the poor and needy is one of the very few charitable acts I regularly engage in. However, it seems my urban outreach programme may need a rethink if [...]
October 2, 2006
An interview in the Sunday Times yesterday said that Bebo head Michael Birch seemed prepared to wait before earning much money from the service: Birch, 36, is almost dismissive of the need for Bebo to generate revenues at this stage. For the next two or three years, his priority is to establish the firm as one [...]
August 9, 2006
An important but under-represented part of Web 2.0 is mobility. The use of RSS, podcasts and CSS design is partly predicated on the idea that we’ll all be accessing web resources from all over the place, using all kinds of devices. Sadly, five years after the launch of the first GPRS (2.5G) services in the [...]
July 4, 2006
There are, of course, already a lot of different applications you can run online, from to-do lists to spreadsheets to photo-editing. Soothsayers and other pundits are predicting that as a consequence, the Great Beast of Redmond will soon be no more, as people abandon Excel and Word for online alternatives. The next step, according to [...]
March 3, 2010