I'm a huge fan of TasteLondon. Their card gives discounts in hundreds of restaurants around London. It's saved me quite a bit of money and I really recommend the service to anyone who likes eating out. TasteLondon Logo There is a small problem with it, though. The directory of restaurants it covers is a fairly heavy paperback book Rather inconvenient to carry around on the off chance that y…
If you really don't want people to download your app - put as many barriers in the way as possible. BlackBerry's Facebook app is a classic example of this. A brilliant application ruined by the rigmarole of actually trying to download it. Let's take a look at what a customer has to do in order to get the app on their phone. I'm on Facebook on my BlackBerry. It's a nice experience, but I want …
Monitoring your home or business used to mean having an array of unsightly camera feeding grainy, washed out pictures into a row of VHS machines. In recent years we've seen the move to digital pictures, infra-red beams for night vision and, most recently, viewing over the Internet. What's the next logical step? Viewing on your mobile, of course! Two British companies have come up with some…
(Usual Disclaimer - I work for Vodafone, but I do not speak on their behalf. Other mobile phone providers are available. I know some of the people at SpinVox and I have an account with them. All biases are my own and should be taken into account before you make a decision.) There has been a lot of talk recently about alternate VoiceMail Providers - especially those who transcribe or otherwise…
An inspiring day. There were, I think, two main points of contention. 1) Information wants to be free - but personal information wants to be private. 2) Raw Data Now. Should we wait for standards - or just make them up as we go along? As for (1) I'm happy for everyone to see my data if I can see theirs. Might reduce hypocrisy. I'm aware that I'm in the minority here. There are a lot of …
Feast your eyes on these beauties. Amarillo Roll is a 3D game in the same style as Super Monkey Ball. You tip your phone to move the armadillo around the course. The graphics are stunning. Reminiscent of early Xbox games. The one thing the photos don't do is convey the speed of gameplay - it's fast! The game is a tech demo from Qualcomm. You can download Armadillo Roll directly from the…
Bletchley Park stands as a testament to the power of mathematics. It represents the idea that brains, not brawn, are vital to winning any conflict. Like many Brits, I learned about the Second World War at school. I devoured books - fiction and non - about the war. What interested me wasn't the tales of derring-do, of men fighting for their lives, bombs, guns, bullets and knives. No, what…
I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else. It would appear that the mobile version of YouTube now includes links to QR codes, so you can share the video with your friends. I've only seen this using the Android browser, I'm not sure if it's available on other devices. Browsing http://m.youtube.com/ at the bottom is a new link A link to a QR code Clicking on it takes you to a QR code The QR …
I'm still writing up my notes from the Connect Biennial Conference in Blackpool which I hope to turn into a full post this week. However, I found an anonymous article in the Socialist Worker decrying the merger vote. Socialist Worker accept comments for publication in the paper, but not on their website, so here's the response I emailed them. Dear Sir, I was a delegate at the Connect…
This blog is XHTML 1.0 Strict. Unfortunately, the code produced by YouTube for embeding their videos isn't. Nor is it compatible with the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack. This scrap of code is a WordPress Plugin. it allows me to write something like [youtube id="p5ACl4iBGd0"] The code then outputs either the XHTML 1.0 embeding code or the XHML-MP code which links to the mobile version of the…
As part of my project to create a mobile polling station locator site, I've been playing with various mapping APIs. As a base experiment, I passed the postcode of a polling station (GU22 7DT) to both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Here are the results. - Two things of interest to note. Firstly, Google has a specific "Mobile" call in the API, it reformats the map image to be more readable on…
It's been a long time since my last post about Twitter on the BlackBerry. Back then I concluded that Dabr wasn't quite up to snuff - how wrong I was! In the last year it has come on leaps and bounds. I've even contributed a few suggestions and lines of code. Without a doubt, Dabr is the best general mobile web client for Twitter. As my main device is a BlackBerry, I wanted something that…
