Augmented reality is awesome and full of practical potential – in design, medicine, gaming and no doubt a dozen other fields – but I’m not surprised its kicking off in marketing first. We seem to be a good test bed for this kind of stuff and have a few people willing to take chances on reasonably nascent technologies.
Charlie Stross’ Halting State has a number of interesting applications (Google Maps overlays, WoW overlays, police grid overlays amongst them) and is well worth a read if you’re into the topic (and Sci-Fi).
My always insightful brother, wearing his hat as MD of Slingshot Studios, home of such films as the upcoming Infidel starring Omid Djalili, was asked for his advice on what it took to start innovative companies by Richard Wray of the Guardian… Here’s some of what he said:
Advice when starting an innovative company: work out what the points of industry and consumer resistance to your proposed innovation will be (i.e. vested interests, legacy technology or organisational structures, consumer behaviour etc). Assume they will be uncompromisingly disinterested or actively opposed to change. Work out a SPECIFIC and TESTED plan as to how you will overcome that opposition. Put as much time into that as you do into the innovation itself.
A lot of the people with great ideas you see (on Dragon’s Den and elsewhere) only get as far as the innovation itself. Overcoming cultural change or the perception that things need to be done in a certain way is a massive challenge in all contexts, whether raising money for a startup or deploying a new process or technology within a business. Throw off the status quo, rebel against the man, man.
More on the Slingshot blog and perhaps in the Guardian this weekend. Keeping eyes peeled for brotherly fame.
Received an email pitch about London Digital Week in late September, and thought it might be the kind of thing that people who follow me might be interested in — I know a few of you London-based social-media digerati have my blog idling in your Google Reader logs.
What is it?
…a week of conferences, workshops, networking, awards and exhibitions bringing together the digital industries in and around London.
Anyway, check it out if the agenda floats your boat… I’m unlikely to be there, not because it doesn’t look like it might be interesting (what’s a Facebook Garage? Are we bored of Camps?), but because its two weeks before I get married and I’m likely to have other things on my mind!
My desktop is getting increasingly virtual, and I’m happier and happier to flip between browsers and machines, as long as I can get Firefox installed and run Xmarks – a very useful bookmarks synchronisation tool.
Pleased to read today that Xmarks is testing a plugin for Chrome which will let me sync my bookmarks with that browser as well – as much as I love the speed and simplicity of Chrome, I can’t use it as my primary browser until it catches up with the essential add-ons I use in Firefox. These include, but are not limited to, Xmarks, IETab (IE emulation for sites that break in FF/Chrome) and Gmail manager.
Having mustered the enthusiasm to blog a little more, and 8 weeks away from our wedding, our broadband has died. It’s hard to tell if its the modem or the DSL line, but I’d like to say at this point that both the modem and my service provider SUCK.
The SP – Pipex Homecall (as was Bulldog, as is some distant part of Tiscali), doesn’t have support numbers obviously listed on its website. Instead, you have to submit an online form through its tedious self service tool, RightKnow. And this is the 5th time in two years something has gone wrong with the line (well, potentially gone wrong with the line), and comes weeks after I discovered they’d been double charging me for 10 months – something they were barely apologetic for and I had to scan and send them 10 months of bank statements to prove. They promise to get back to queries within two days – which is a long time when you’ve got as much going on as I do! If broadband is the next essential utility after electricity, water and gas, these guys are going to have to get better at responding to faults. Tools.
The modem – is less than a year old and came with an 11 YEAR warranty. But I can’t afford to be offline, so I’m not going to get to call it in before I have to buy a replacement. Eat it, D-Link.
Anyway, rant over. This can be a social media monitoring test for those guys, see if anyone offers me anything by way of apology or compensation, but I think its unlikely. [sigh].
Update: It was the network. The router is still alive. Apologies, D-Link. You’re OK. Pipex, you suck.
So I’ve been a faithful user of Windows Mobile since 2002 or so and the SPV 100 first launched, an underpowered but otherwise apparently well specced and capable phone. For me its ease of use, the instant familiarity of the OS and the fact it synched with my desktop were all strong motivating factors, and I was especially fond of the pre-emptive dialling feature, where you typed a contact’s name in numbers and it found it for you and let you dial them from the homescreen… Making it useful as a phone as well as a primitive Internet device – astonishing at the time.
Today, despite having used a succession of ever better designed devices, I bid it farewell. Despite the fact that the HTC Touch Dual, my last phone, was the first phone i haven’t immediately retired on becoming eligible for upgrade, it was no longer up to the job. It wasn’t really geared up for touch, had lagged behind with its Internet capabilities and the newest incarnations have shown little improvement (WM 6.5… Really?) so I’ve had to jump ship. The fact with hundreds of different Windows Mobile devices and millions of handsets, both the iPhone and Android are ahead in mobile Internet access kind of underlines the point, as does the fact that most of this post was drafted on the bus on the way to work using the new handset, the iPhone 3GS, with a WordPress app. Outstanding.
I’m not an Apple fanboy (seriously, I resisted this purchase like you wouldn’t believe), but for now, this fits my purpose. If Microsoft start innovating again (and not just relying on their hardware vendors to fix the problems in the underlying platform with innovative ‘skins’) then I will look at them again (Zunephone, please). But I suspect that both Android and Apple have stolen a lead that MS will never recover from…
So despite the fact that the prevailing opinion from my Twitter contacts and friends alike was that I should wait for the Kindle to grace the shores of the UK, the holiday in Denmark with three bulky paperbacks squeezed into a too-cramped rucksack and the impending implosion of my bookshelves into some minor singularity broke me, and I picked up a Sony PRS 505 from Play.com about two weeks ago. I’d seen my friend Rob with one and had a pretty good idea it would be decent, which its proving to be, and I had a feeling that the Kindle would be some time coming…
Here’s what’s good about it:
1) It stores lots of book in a sleek, elegant casing. I’ve shoved a 1GB SD card (at a cost of a not so princely £4) in there, which will cover me for at least 1000 books but potentially as many as 3000 – which is probably more than I’ll need on there
2) It works well with the open source Calibre, even under Windows7 RC1 64bit, which is something of a relief (as I gather the Sony software is its usual bag of decaying tripe)
3) The screen is amazing. E-Ink works like an etch-a-sketch, so reads well in any light. It also makes for…
4) …awesome battery life. Due to the etch-a-sketch nature of the device, it only draws power when turning pages. So one charge (by USB cable), will give you room for about 4000 page turns
5) You can get books. Waterstones has many, even if Amazon is probably banking on the arrival of the Kindle in the UK at some stage.
The not-so-good
1) I’ve already mentioned Sony’s software… the navigation on the device itself is not brilliant, no way to go directly to a page (that I’ve found as yet), not until you’ve made bookmarks (although it remembers what page you were last reading), and there’s no search functionality, ability to make notes etc. I’m also having some fiddling with page alignment (page numbers in middle of page, NBSPs, etc)
2) There’s no wireless connectivity – hence awesome battery life, but hey, if I want wireless, well, that’s what the iPhone I’m planning on getting will do…
3) The page-turning is not that speedy, although its not terrible
All in all, it’s up there with my Netbook in all-time useful purchases. I carry it around daily, have got through two novels on it in two weeks and will probably maintain close to that rate, saving valuable bookshelf real-estate, holiday packing and being stuck on the bus in between books…
Here’s a quick video demo from some dude on Youtube:
1) AVG Free – v7 was very good, but I’ve found v8 to be a little clunky; it slows down my machine and recently corrupted itself on Amanda’s, so we’ve moved over to…
2) Avast, on Chris‘ recommendation. As well as its awesome piratical name, it has a smaller footprint (so runs faster), and seems to work well. You do need to register, which is slightly tedious, but has been worth it so far.
You may need a firewall as well, to keep properly secure, but you’ll have to research those yourself for now…
The TomTom One XL warped us through Bristol, Bath and Basing countryside, helping us when it was dark, raining, trafficky and generally too much hassle for maps. We didn’t encounter any significant issues despite using it for journeys large and small, intricate and simple. It is definitely weaker when you have to encounter private roads (e.g. going to shopping centres etc), but you should definitely be doing some thinking yourself when you’re driving, so perhaps that’s for the best.
The comedy voices (Jean-Luc, Yoda etc) were, as previously blogged, invariably dropped in favour of someone more normal. I’d always want to switch back to Jean Luc for the end of the journey, though, as being told to ‘engage docking procedures’ always made me smile.
BUT: I still haven’t convinced Amanda. I think she gets satisfaction from the process and mental discipline required to plot out and follow a route in the old school way. So it may be a while before we source a SatNav device for use in this household, but again that all depends on how well the driving instruction goes…
…which is OK. But I need to practice my maneuvers. Part of me feels I need to book a test so I have a deadline to work towards; most of me feels like I really don’t have enough time to get ‘good’ enough to persuade the DVLA to give me a license. [sigh]. More work needed.
Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.
