Way back before Facebook, when the Internet was made of string and chewing gum, when Scrabble was a game for old people and nerds, I was.... Well.... A nerd!I loved Scrabble and attained the heady heights of school champion! But it wasn't enough. I had tasted power and wanted more. I devoured Scrabble strategy books, word lists, reverse dictionaries and spent the nights dreaming about triple…
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I've seen two very different adverts recently which, in my opinion are bad. Very bad. I'd even go so far as to say that they are terrible. The first is a poster advert seen at my local train station. A tagline, a shot of the service and a URL. Let's break it down. 1) The URL. I initially typed in w4mobile rather than w4mobiles - and got a non-mobile friendly page. It would have been better …
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(Archived from B3ta's "How Nerdy Are You" QOTW) I could bore you all with thrilling tails of BBC Micro programming, mobile phone USSD commands, obscure Mornington Crescent rules - but I won't. I'll tell you a tale of a small, frightened little nerd... I was about 3 years old and had been asked to be a page boy at my cousins wedding. I was under strict instruction that my job was to protect the…
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I love the BBC iPlayer. Now that it works on Linux (and anything else with Flash 9) it's a really good way to catch up on shows without having to go to The Pirate Bay and wade through mountains of crap. There are only 2 problems.... 1) I can't download the shows 2) I can't stream the shows to my phone (Nokia N95 and Blackberry 8800) Now, the BBC have released a version of the iPlayer for the…
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I really want to like Nokia. They produce some amazing hardware, but time and time again, they're let down by poor software with a dreadful user experience. Take the recent n-gage launch. N-gage was a flop when it originally launched several years ago. It's absolutely critical for Nokia to get this relaunch right or else they face a T5 like PR failure. But Nokia being Nokia, they've fallen at…
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The Internet is abuzz with the on-going spat between the BBC and the UK ISP industry. In short, the iPlayer is now responsible for 5% of all data traffic in the UK. That figure is growing. The problem is that the ISPs have been selling "unlimited" internet connectivity when their capacity is severly limited. The ISPs are trying to make up for their lack of investment in their systems by…
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I'm updating the blog's template to be .mobi compliant. I'm using the Blogger mobile template found on the dev.mobi site.After seeing it on SMSTextNews I'm implanting Disqus comments. Let's see if we can get them validating against the W3c. …
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I went along to the Social Media Cafe's talk on The Future of Voice. It was a wide ranging discussion on how we use our own voices in different situations and how we use our product's voice. A couple of questions for you to ponder. There are no right or wrong answers and no prizes, just something to seep into your brain. Voice If you saw your voice written down, could you place it? …
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There's been a lot of talk over the last year about web-mobile transcoding proxies and all the pitfalls (and pratfalls) that go with them. Last year at mobileCampLondon I gave a talk to people interested in the subject. At various industry events people come up to me to talk about the issue. Recently, this topic has been reignited with an interview with Jayanthi Rangarajan in Mobile Marketing…
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The unstoppable rise of QR codes continues! Last week I picked up two of the London free-sheets. Both of them sporting scanable codes. CITY A.M. uses the code to take you to its mobile friendly site. They recommend the i-nigma reader which you can get by texting "i-nigma" to 88010 (in the UK). Page 7 of thelondonpaper. Opodo uses a QR code to offer £20 off flights. Interestingly, …
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Well. Yes, probably. I have a small character flaw. I don't like authority. I question authority. I overreact sometimes. This is me being stopped under Section 44(2) of The Terrorism Act 2000. I informed the police that I would be videoing and streaming to QIK. The video was cross posted to Phreadz and discussed on BoingBoing. (Note - the Qik video service died in 2015 and I rehosted…
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Following on from my encounter with the police, I decided to file a complaint against Office 4825 for refusing to show me his ID via the BTP's public complaint form. Dear Sir or Madam,Office 4825 of the British Transport Police refused to show my his ID or Warrant Card when asked. I had been stopped under S.44(2) of The Terrorism Act 2000. The incident happened at around 0854BST on…
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