Disqus - Latest Comments for juliancooling

Re: How Apple’s device strategy is making an impact on the enterprise

juliancooling — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 13:23:32 -0000

What you say is true. I am most curious about how the tie up with IBM will work out in most enterprises. In any organisation that can afford IBM (which is a select group), the decision to pay the money to bring them in, is taken at the top levels. Enterprises that are focusing on Linux, VMWare and Microsoft (and dabbling with cloud and software as a service) will still want iOS but may find IBMification an added cost to undo or work around.

Re: Opinion piece: Why threaded communication is the way ahead for business

juliancooling — Fri, 02 May 2014 12:31:43 -0000

I am a big fan - this is definitely the way to go. I have never seen it expressed so well (thank you Peter and Ewan).

As Peter makes clear, this is about solving a business problem not an IT one. The art is making it scale in stupidly complex businesses with the lightest possible IT activity needed to support changes, where you have:

1. a single point of contact for external entities
2. a vast array of back end departments, each with their own customer/supplier relationships and IT teams, all channeled contact data through that single point
3. an automation engine that supports the business meaning behind those different relationships but doesn't implement tight dependencies by accident

For threading to work, the automation needs to know enough about what the messages mean to prioritise, direct and respond appropriately for every 3rd party and silo'd business unit. However you don't want every innovation in the transport/shipping department needing a corresponding change in the automation engine - that way lies gridlock. Getting this right (and it can be done) requires some funky abstraction, ego-less design work and real sensitivity to the business as it is.

Re: Mobile Device Management: Is it the Answer … or is it the Question?

juliancooling — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:42:09 -0000

The next article about integrating mobile app dev into an SDLC (a hot topic in many firms right now) has been proofed and is waiting on Ewan's publishing queue. However, if he is happy to hold off for a day or two, I am willing to try and make it punchier.

Re: Dell Streak goes Android 2.1

juliancooling — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 11:12:53 -0000

OK - I put my comment on the wrong thread. Not very clever, but here will do.

Re: Where’s that Dell Streak 2.1 update? It’s here! [Final Update]

juliancooling — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 11:10:48 -0000

I think very poorly of the iPad but I do like the idea of the pocketable internet, as in "Oh! I have the internet on my somewhere... there it is, it was in my jacket pocket". If you are carrying the iPad, you can't not remember where it is. The iPhone, as magic as it is, is just too small.

Hence, I want on of these - for research purposes only, naturally.

Edit - wrong forum. I should not be allowed next to a computer on Saturday afternoons.

Re: Dear World (and especially Robert Scoble)

juliancooling — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:05:45 -0000

I agree with the strong AI. People's inability to embrace change is a furphy - they do it all the time but only when it is worth it to them. It is a classic example of great vision but where is the business case?

The biggest problem I had with the piece was the amount of junk that these notification systems would generate. I would be spammed out of existence. I am meant to be driving a car and I get a note every time a friend's diary is updated saying that they are going to be sharing some experience. We are friends, we have similar interests - THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN ALL OF THE TIME!

The AI is going to have to hide the routine coincidences. They are simply not interesting and there will be far too many of them. However the non-routine stuff is going to be largely uninteresting. My old school buddy coming to London may not be news that excites me - there may be a reason why we drifted apart. I may have forgotten to fully brief my phone on the reason and my phone night struggle to communicate to me how things have changed and why, now, we may want to catch up.

In this dysfunctional future I can see myself in never ending public spats with my phone about who I should and shouldn't want to see.

Re: Some thoughts on M-Publishing

juliancooling — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:37:49 -0000

Here I was thinking it was growing an afro, reading material written by experts and barely understanding any of them and then quoting them randomly to support completely misguided conclusions in the popular press...

The pop part comes from all of the rigorous economics fairies going"pop" every time somebody in the audience claps their hands.

But seriously folks, I am not a big fan of "the BRIC nations are about to take over the world" - I don't think they have the economic or political maturity. However, I do believe that the economic clout of the world will be more evenly distributed between individual people and that the infrastructure to support it will be mobile and highly interactive. Further the new consumers will take existing content but will have NONE of the historical understanding of even current distribution models or physical media. However they will understand paying.

Re: Some thoughts on M-Publishing

juliancooling — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:06:10 -0000

I'll bite.

And I'll use the Nokia/Yahoo tie in as the model.

Further I will use "The Economist"'s world view of the rising middle classes (more than $2 per day) in the developing world.

I'll even maintain my nearly incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness style.

The answer is that portals a la 1990 are out but a portal tied elegantly and useably to a mobile device so that the whole of the world's culture, trade and communications infrastructure is accessed through that device NO MATTER WHERE IS UGANDA YOU ARE is a killer offering. No matter how many corn cobs you have to sell at market, you can check whole of Uganda corn cob market prices as you negotiate your sale to the wholesaler - as is now happening - and then get back home and join in an adult education class shared with the elders of your village and other, far off villages.

For this to work Yahoo's servers can be anywhere and Nokia's UI (physical and software) must have an elegant sufficiency to support it. This world wide market will pay good money (The Economist estimates $0.50 discretionary income for this 5.5 billion people in market segment) for all of this stuff. The big question is getting mobile money for Nokia (in real use in India and some of Africa) tied to the Yahoo content deals so that an appropriate portion of the $0.50 per day heads back to content providers (including market information, cash remittance, health and educational providers).

The people who live in these markets will never own fixed line telecommunications, probably will never read a traditional newspaper and possibly will skip books (reusable school text books and the Bible may be honourable exceptions). They are set to use the mobile device to completely bypass 150 years of post Dickensian popular publishing (his revolutionary magazine was called Household Words and his interminable stories were just one part of each edition).

My feeling is that this will be the future of popular culture (I think that both Apple and Nokia see it this way - but Apple haven't got "it" in the same way Nokia has). Where the M-Publishing conference is likely (and this is just a guess) to have headed into the long grass, will be focusing on high margin Western markets (replacement aka the Apple path) rather than low margin, high volume, culturally segmented markets (what I anticipate is the Nokia path).

Of course I may be confusing myself with pop economics and lazy thinking...

Re: Rumoured Nokia and Yahoo alliance confirmed

juliancooling — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:01:40 -0000

Very impressed. The web isn't what it was 10 years' ago and the internet isn't what it was 20 years' ago. The web is gaining a lot of implicit structure as it transitions from being an information repository towards service oriented information (yada yada yada).

Apple has gone down the App path to curate the mobile data experience but that isn't going to work for everyone as it really kills flexibility because the initial curating is client side and the power of the internet is on the server side. WebOS came close to cracking it but the hardware sucked and Palm had no fully curated back-end (the app store problems were a distraction given the design philosophy of the OS).

Nokia, with a real and monstrous backend service oriented internet provider, will put a killer, curated mobile experience into every users' pocket. Remember that Yahoo! started out as a curated search engine as opposed to Johnny-come-lately Google's algorithmic search. For a mobile experience for news, finance, Q&A, maps, reviews, storage, email, blogs etc in a post Web2.0 world this could be big.

Nokia is nothing in North America but in Asia, South America and Africa it is the Bees' Knees. The growth potential for Yahoo getting out of a very wealthy but no-growth market such as the US and putting its services into the pockets of billions of people in all of these emerging economies would make my legs go weak. Further, Nokia gets a depth of content on its devices backed by a seriously trusted brand with a history of delivering focused, useful stuff... Yeah, the third world may be poor but I would prefer to be selling a lot of not much to billions than get crushed at the top end of the consolidating US market.

Re: What is the iPad for? [Guest Post]

juliancooling — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:27:11 -0000

Not all publishers' names end in Murdoch. Van Gough painting away on his portable easel in the sun-drenched South of France and sending his pictures up to brother in Paris was, in a way, publishing. It is still much the same today for the guys in the experimental gallery round the back of my flat in South London.

Is the iPad a brand new way of creating art or is it a technology refresh for the artist in the garret to get new work to the adoring brother (and public) in the wider world?

So yes, you can create stuff on it but it is a fairly lonely task and worse, hard work when you consider the hardware and file exchange support that is missing.

Re: iPhone OS 4: Welcome to fragmentation-land Apple [Updated]

juliancooling — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:13:34 -0000

I also don't think it is fragmentation. This is linear where every OS version is a complete superset of the previous version. You don't have to do individual feature tests (where the feature tests themselves differ between versions) you can just test for the OS release number and know what is available.

The fragmentation is between the iPad, iPod and iPhone where, to maximise the value of each platform, every application writer is going to have to do a raft of feature tests to know what functionality to expose to the user and what to hide. Some of this will be helped by the APIs (calls will return approximate or, alternatively, "failed to work" values) but things like screen size require real programming changes - user interfaces aren't something you can scale and pretend that it will look nice.

Re: Nokia dropping Symbian from N-Series by 2012 [UPDATED]

juliancooling — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:18:43 -0000

I think Google (the IT company) and Whitehall (the bureaucracy) use the word "open" in much the same way. The end users of both organisations trust Google's definition of "open systems" in the same way as Whitehall's "open government". I am happy to use both but I would read the fine print with scepticism (and a lawyer) before signing up to be in business jointly with either.

Re: Video Diary: Whatley & the Sony Ericsson Satio in Soho

juliancooling — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:35:47 -0000

Do I want to buy this phone to replace my P800? I think I am getting ready to jump and for some reason Whatley's standoffish review made it seem appealing.

Update: Don't bother answering - nothing currently out there justifies upgrading my P800. It's an icon and they are difficult to come by.

Re: Niall Murphy of The Cloud: Viewers' Questions [Part 2 of 2]

juliancooling — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:16:09 -0000

My first exprience of a "cloud" like service provision was in Adelaide (Oz) with the incredibly inovative and successful ISP turned telco Internode (the same company that caused all of the international ruckous over the Great Australian Firewall) aka Agile Communications.

They planned a complete Wifi system "CityLan" in the CBD and made it free to all customers of their ISP or partner ISPs in 2006. They also sold it as an ISP service to all of the city's residents. The idea being that nobody would want to buy personal Wifi transceivers if they had a commerically powered one right outside their window beaming in. Anyone who was an Internode customer (or ISP partner customer) could login. It extended your existing ISP contract with mobility.

However, I notice that CityLan is now free and partnered by the city council. If their business model which made me pay up (I refuse to give telco's a penny if I can) didn't work then I don't think The Cloud in London is not going to be an easy thing to sell. Adelaide is a nice compact place with straight streets and good sight lines, better weather than Paris and not much in the way of rain - work actually does happen streetside in cafes.

Obviously it might work (wifi isn't going to dissapear) but if I were in the public wfi provisioning game I would want my remuneration in up-front salary rather than deferred bonuses or share options.

Re: The launch of the Land Rover S1 by Sonim

juliancooling — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:33:40 -0000

I can see a use for this at some of the utilities I have been with. First line emergency call out (both water and gas) often is in dreadful conditions at night and, often enough, in trenches. 3 or 4 hours of continuous call time would make a big difference to these guys.

The API would also mean companies doing works management systems (e.g. Maximo) can put "in the field" interfaces onto a device like this and it won't matter if it gets dropped in a flooded trench where they are bashing things with large steel pipes trying to stop the leaks. I'm over selling it, but a lot of this work does happen in bad conditions and lots of water is fairly typical.

I do wonder about the man-down function. You drop your phone and it rings emergency services: I can see that getting very tiring very fast.

Re: Thoughts on O2's iPhone 3GS offering

juliancooling — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:15:58 -0000

My problem is that all of these company's are forcing their users onto 18 month and 24 month contracts for a phone with a very, very public upgrade cycle of 1 year.

I am fine with them offering longer term contracts for those who want them but all great contracts are all about setting and meeting expectations. People who are forking out for the iPhone may well want an "auto-upgrade" package with a 1 year hardware upgrade built in.

From O2's persepctive that's great: do the maths and price a package with a bell or a whistle (even both) and put it on the market. It's the only package half the people I know with an iPhone would want. Heck, they may even sign up for a 3 year contract if the hardware was sent out by post on release day direct from the factory.

Re: Video Diary: James and Ben on Vodafone's Summer Roaming

juliancooling — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:46:29 -0000

Is that a 1970's mobile phone leaning against the wall behind Ben's right shoulder?

Having seen Ben stuck in a space without decent 3G or 2G coverage - I can imagine him reverting to his Scout's creed and packed an analogue mobile in his backpack "just in case".

Re: Nokia's N97 & 5800XM: The trouble with 16:9

juliancooling — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:30:12 -0000

Mr Facts on Demand.

Actually this might make a good point of comparison in a phone face-off: Nokia great lens and pixel count but impossible angles. iPhone bad a everything optical and now proven by Smithian science.

Re: I just Re-Tweeted Sky News. When’s the story go up? ;-)

juliancooling — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:15:30 -0000

Umm - given that it was 4.6 (much softer than 5.1 and less likely to leave anyone other than the parrots homeless) I think I will give news by gossip a miss for the big stories.

Re: Preview of interview with Simon Ainslie, Head of Nokia UK

juliancooling — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:51:34 -0000

Hmm we seem to have re-discovered the free as in "expression" vs free as in "beer". CWM is sold(?) as free as in beer but you rlife belongs to the contract holder.

I think people are much happier with free as in expression where you pays your cash and is free to do what you wants.

In an age where businesses talk about owning a customer relationship, I don't think that is what anybody has in mind.

Re: More and more annoyed at the book industry

juliancooling — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:45:40 -0000

Has anyone thought of subscribing to the Times Literary Suplement or the London Review of Books. Both are a push service delivered to you regularly and have the added advantage that you can flip down the top edge when your wife speaks to you over the breakfast table (they come with a special foldy bit).

It also acts as a ultra-geek shield on the train - you can be texting behind it and nobody ever suspects that you might be geeking behind such a non-geeky masthead. A ebook reader won't work nearly as well.

Re: If there was one thing you could change, what would it be?

juliancooling — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:08:04 -0000

This one is easy. It should be legal to break a contract for poor customer service. That is, the regulator should force an standard clause into all fixed term contracts saying that if the contract terms are not actively supported by the service provider the customer can walk with no penalty.

They can use the same wording as the banking regulator has insisted on.

Re: Nokia ‘Comes with Music’ set to change the marketplace?

juliancooling — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:25:29 -0000

I am missing something here. Who is paying the per-performance fee. A radio station pays for every broadcast song but it has a revenue streams that correspond to its fees.

Is Nokia charging a premium upfront to cover the first year's fees? What about year 2. I still run a P800 bought on its release - admittedly that is a long time for a phone, but will also be a long time for Nokia between revenue refreshes if too many people start doing this kind of thing - and as phones get better people will refresh less (especially if it means losing fabulous on-off deals that are tied to the handset).

Re: Tonight we’re at Sony Ericsson’s summer party

juliancooling — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:58:52 -0000

They went out of fashion?

I am still using my P800 as my only phone!

In all honesty, I keep thinking I will replace it but it is a piece of design genius - just a bit dated (and it really doesn't do network data).

Re: We’re off to the Tower of London for this week’s podcast

juliancooling — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:26:19 -0000

You may get some fantastic bridge lifts in - there are two ocean liners (one going and one coming) at the HMS Belfast at 2:20 and 4:45 (plus some tugs and barges).

http://www.towerbridge.org....