A Text To End Your Phone Contract
Phone companies aren’t always the easiest to deal with, especially it seems, in the UK where traditionally you have had to put a call in to the company you wish to leave. You get charged for a transfer period, and your transfer is delayed. Ofcom, who regulate...
The Drama Of SpaceX And The Zuma Load
It’s always interesting to watch any of Elon Musk’s projects because he likes to take on the larger problems that are out there in the technology field and find effective solutions that help as many people as possible. A reusable rocket has been something...
Vuzix AR Glasses Are Apparently What Google Glass Wanted To Be
I like to think of myself as someone who is interested in technology, and that if given the opportunity I will hook myself up with the latest tech, but sometimes I fail to see how a thing could really be of much use in my life. Perhaps that is my failing, even if you...
Page Load Speed
Page Load Speed Is Important Ever sat there and suffered from a page that just doesn’t seem to want to load? Ever gone to a site and wondered if you have suddenly been transported back in time to a period when dial-up was the latest technology and you could go...
Robot Jobpocalypse At Walmart
Walmart is the largest employer in 25 states of the US. Walmart is pioneering a store with no cashiers. Couple this with the move in a lot of warehouse to replace traditional picker packers with automated systems, and the largest provider of jobs for unskilled workers...
Cryptokitties Snarling Up The Blockchain For Ethereum Users
I Can Haz Cryptokitties? Cats and the internet go hand in hand, and apparently the same is true of cats and blockchain technology. Why? Because cats. A game called Cryptokitties has spiked in usage, and at the same time pending transactions on the Ethereum Blockchain...
Mobile Friendly
Mobile Friendliness Is Important When An Increasing Number Of People View Your Site That Way Are you mobile friendly? When the internet first became a big thing it was viewed on Desktop Computers, this shifted to laptops as the machines became more portable, then...
Microsoft Windows Sets – A Browser Revolution?
Game Set And Match For Windows 10 With Windows Sets? When Windows 10 arrived, one of the best things about it was Edge, their new browser. After some of the terrible clunkiness of Windows 7 and 8, it really looked like Microsoft had started to listen to the people...
Star Wars Battlefront 2: Free To Play Mechanics Are A Spanner In The Works
Star Wars Battlefront 2: The Battlefront Of Gameplayers Who Don’t Want To Pay I have to work hard to earn the credits to unlock the main characters. The credits needed to get the right loot are too much. Micro-transactions are a pain. The litany of complaints...
Smart Writing From Moleskine & Microsoft
Experience Writing With The Ability To Cross Post Moleskine & Microsoft are both well known in their fields, but are not possibly the most obvious collaborators. There is something qualitatively different not only in the experience of using pen and paper, but in...
Koch Brothers & Time Magazine: Purchasing Personal Propaganda Machines
Is Time Up For Time Magazine? Koch Brothers & Time Magazine are in talks. No one would claim that journalists have a great approval rating as it is, but news that groups like the Koch Brothers are making the leap from behind the scenes influencers to media moguls...
Amazon Re-Keying The Future
Everything To Everyone Is What All The Big Players Want To Be How far into your life are you willing to let Amazon reach? You have your library locked in on Kindle, and your DVD collection was replaced by Amazon Prime, your music is in their cloud, your website is...
Government Social Media Programs
China Wants To Rate How Good It’s Citizens Are When it comes to dystopian futures I love a lot of them (the depiction I mean, not the notion of living in one), but I tend to think that Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where incompetence, and not some vast shadowy...
End To End Encryption Isn’t The Problem
A lot of column inches have been given to the UK’s continuing crackdown on companies that use end to end encryption. This technology means that only the people communicating can read the messages, and that it can’t be eavesdropped on, even by the company...
AI And The Future
It has been a staple of science fiction for a long time – from Robbie The Robot, through Hal, and the Terminator, Bishop in the Alien series, to the machines in The Matrix, to Ex-Machina, even Bender from Farscape. It’s always pretty bleak – as soon...
Pushback Against the Gig Economy
Is The Gig Economy Inevitable? Airbnb is not popular everywhere nor with everyone – as seen in a recent spat with the Hotel Association of New York City. Uber’s battles have been perhaps even more public; with the parties involved seemingly even more...
Twitter Expanding To 280
Will 280 Words Allow For More Nuanced Tweets? 280 words instead of 140. Does it mean anything? I have read that it may be intended to increase the signal to noise ratio – upping the complexity of what can be communicated, bringing more nuance to the table, but I...
Airbnb Disaster Response Tool
Results Should Be Prized Above Altruism With These Programs Facebook’s Safety Check had been one of those things I initially thought was a little bit intrusive and excessive, and then I got to use it, and I saw that some of my friends in dangerous places were...
What Does GAFA Mean For Everyone?
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – they tower over civilization like the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this concerns some people. The European Union doesn’t like the control that these companies are exerting on the market, but they are fast...
Sousveillance – With A Whimper Not A Bang
Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies. Aug 30, 2016 Brave New World and 1984 got it wrong – a lot of dystopias do. We are the ones who are helping to...
Innovation & The Evolutionary Necessity Of Moonshots – Thinking In Futures
If You Want To Get Anywhere, You Have To Aim Higher! You can of course choose to plod along, looking at your feet, thinking only of handling the problems that confront you in the here and now. Sure, there are engineering problems that need to be handled to make the...
Yawntech
Innovation Isn’t About Repackaging Or Rebooting Oh, Apple made a speaker. Apple made a slightly larger phone. Google made a speaker. Amazon made a speaker with a camera. There has to be some kind of disruption coming in the hardware field, because at the moment...
Advertising Better Security: WannaCry’s Harsh Lesson
Advertising Protection For Computers Is A Big Business: But Not Big Enough Apparently The “WannaCry” virus’s name is apt for the reaction it’s likely to cause in its victims. As I keep saying, all the time really—like a looping song—the world runs on technology, and...