Interestingly, I’ve had a lot of people contact me recently to remind me about, or ask after, those original 100 Ideas I posted on my website, which you can still find (and they went beyond 100) with the search box (try this). I apologise that I never got around to collating the first 100 ideas [...]

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Why can’t I get in contact with people by telephone sometimes (often)? It’s simple. My telephone only offers me a 50/50 chance, or less, of making contact. If I dial your number, I have no idea if you’re available or not.
Why do we still have this problem? After all, we live in an age of [...]

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Following on from 100 things kids should know, we had a bash at figuring out the basics of project management. Key ideas explored were:
1. Notion of resources
2. Notion of tasks
3. Connectivity of one task to another (output to an input) - sequential tasks
4. The evil of all projects - the critical path!
5. Parallel tasks
Usually I [...]

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I just witnessed - again - how the Internet actually runs on craziness. It relies on people doing crazy things. Some people do crazy things. I remember some guy who spent about 6 months reverse-engineering a Nokia phone so that he could hack it with his own native apps. That’s the kind of craziness and [...]

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Here’s a thought…
Imagine something like coverflow on the iPhone, but not for browsing album covers. Imagine pointing the device and as you move it through space, the artwork flows to show videos, pictures and other stuff just hanging out there in space (see any of my various earlier postings about graffiti) wherever the device is [...]

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Talking to a few of you, it seems that there’s interest in continuing with the “100 Ideas” thread. I think I got to 110 before I stopped the thread, although not the ideas
I’ve just finished writing the second edition of Next Generation Wireless Applications, which is a fairly major upgrade. As you might [...]

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I wandered lonely as a cloud from Blogger to my own domain, new home of my blog. I hope the move doesn’t prove to be a pain in the backside, like so many techno chores often are. Many times I have vowed never again to “grub around” in the bowels of any technical plumbing. I [...]

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I think it was Jakob Nielsen who first identified (in one of the earliest WAP usability field trials) that a great “use” for mobile phones (actually for WAP) was killing time. It is hard not to notice that anywhere you go where there are people sitting waiting, they are usually fiddling with their mobile phone. [...]

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In my book and some workshops, I give an anatomy of a mobile phone. A bit of modem here, an operating system there, a sprinkle of APIs, MIDP sauce and so on. I include a “dialler application”, which is not often found on the average handset block diagram. It’s the thingy that takes numbers from [...]

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People like me often get missed calls. For a number of reasons, I can’t or don’t always answer my mobile. Eventually a bank of voicemails builds up. One of the most tedious mobile experiences (”anti-experience”?) is the laborious wading through a talking voicemail service - “you have seven new messages and ……. [there's [...]

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When I hold workshops for operators I divide value-added services into basic categories. One category - usually the first - is “enhanced voice”. It seems to me an amazing feat that after nearly two decades of mobile telephony (and over a century of regular telephony) we are still stuck with the same basic voice features [...]

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In the UK, and lots of other markets, the calling party pays (except when calling a roaming mobile, when the charge is shared). It would be great to set up relationships between callers so that the called party can nominate to pay the charges. This might work well between adults and kids - not necessarily [...]

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All my kids have Nintendo DS lite - in all colours (black, white and pink). I watch as they struggle to force them into their trouser pockets. I’m still adamant that garment design isn’t keeping up with technological habits. My older brother still pokes fun at my techno “clothing ideas” (remember the socks?) so I [...]

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I recently sat in a cafe and watched a teenaged boy take his brand new phone out of its box, insert the battery and start “playing” with it. Not surprisingly, before long we could all here an array of ring tunes whistling their merry way across the cafe. Ring tones have come a long way [...]

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In my household, we now have a Mac Mini as a “home entertainment” system for the sitting room. We discovered the really exciting Garage Band application for composing/recoding music. Moreover, we hooked it up to our keyboard via the midi port - great for easy composing and the kids are amazed at the conversion of [...]

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