Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
For me, the patent wars, in which so many major brands are currently embroiled are fascinating because of the underlying biases they expose. Read any story about XYZ Corp winning a legal battle and scroll down to the comments and you'll find acres of diatribe about just how immoral it is for XYZ Corp to… Continue reading Patently
Rarely is it inexplicable why something hasn’t worked. The things that succeed are the few, are the exceptions. Most technology projects aren’t huge successes. But the odds are stacked so heavily in favour of Google Plus that it’s almost hard to believe it isn’t the world’s best and most popular site already. And it’s clearly… Continue reading G-
Over at AdLiterate, Richard Huntingdon has been doing an infinitely better job, it seems, of my favorite hobby - disecting pointless brand 'immersion campaigns'. We now have a very wide selection of examples of supremely stupid advertising-agency-created ideas encouraging the clearly disinterested reader to put down what they were doing and get involved in a supreme act… Continue reading Taking apart taking part
It takes a very cold heart indeed to not love a user-experience concept which can be illustrated using a mathematical formula. Look at Fitts’s law: This set of symbols help us understand that the ability to point at something on a screen (or in real life) is dependent on the size of the thing in… Continue reading Decision time
The human genome project started in 1990 and continues today (I guess with ever decreasing marginal return) towards the exhaustive mapping of the core physical cells which make us. Definitions vary on when the project will be ‘complete’ but as Ray Kurzweil points out, we are accelerating towards whichever version of completeness you chose, as… Continue reading Mapping the human enome
Well I've been lucky enough to borrow a pre-launch Windows Phone 7 for a few serious chunks of time over the last couple of weeks - enough to properly start living with the device, getting all synced up with Exchange, Facebook, Gmail etc; putting a few hits of the 80s on there; and copying across… Continue reading Copy and taste
News just in from the department of the extremely obvious - iPhone users can be a little obsessional and, even, delusional. It seems a consultancy has invested a serious amount of time to diagnose what they call the 'iPhone syndrome'. Strand Consulting tells us that the iPhone isn't that great a phone but that users… Continue reading Lost in telecommunication
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I'm a huge fan of the Register and Andrew Orlowski in particular for telling it the way it is. Perhaps with a little added sneering cynicism thrown in for good measure. Orlowski's retrospective on the good old days of Google 'Google abandons Search' is very much… Continue reading The search is over
Most people got to know the inimitable Anthony H Wilson, who died two years ago, by seeing him on Granada TV, or one of the Granada shows that was broadcast outside the Manchester region, like "Other Side of Midnight" or "After Hours". And, a whole generation got know him from the Hacienda or other Factory… Continue reading Eulogies
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Well, we find out that either the force wasn't really unstoppable or the object wasn't really unmovable. And so, the News International empire is about to collide with the self-appointed monarchy of the internet, Google. It's tempting to paint this as a battle of good… Continue reading Here comes the Sun
Leading product 