CoCo

Amateur thoughts on immigration

2010-07-10T17:05:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I went to my son's school for the annual Prize Giving ceremony. In all there were 134 prizes awarded to boys from all years in the school. What struck me was the number of pupils who were not from white British ethnic stock.

According to my own amateur stab at the maths (and judging only from what I could see) 31% of the children getting prizes fell into the category of 2nd generation immigrant and of those getting the prize for best academic performance in each form, more than one in five fell into the category.

Britain, and the rest of the West, has a major challenge finding its competitive place in the world in the 21st century and it seems to me that we will need all the help we can get from new, ambitious, eager blood arriving on these shores. It was immigration (added to resources and opportunity) which propelled the US to the top of the global league table. Bringing down the shutters is about the worst thing we could do.

China and Google

2010-03-28T13:03:00.001+01:00

I was in Shanghai last week when the disagreement between Google and the Chinese Government stepped up a gear and Google pointed local traffic to unsensored results in Hong Kong. The immediate effect was very erratic services for many Google services as the Chinese Government worked out what to do. Google has started providing its own update of the state of its various services and you can see the continuing fall out.

Facebook and Twitter were also blocked last week - but that is now normal.

Some commentators are arguing that Google should reconsider and get back into the market in mainland China as the market is too big and fast-growing to ignore. Whatever the merits of that argument, the current policy the Chinese Government is pursuing is more likely to hurt China than help it, I think.

True, there are now very vibrant Chinese companies serving the same functions as the global giants - Baidu for search for instance, or Qzone for social networking - but without competition from global players innovation is likely to stagnate. And a China cut off from the network effects of the global internet economy will be a poorer place in the long run.

App stores for business?

2010-03-06T18:06:00.001+00:00

Will app stores take over the enterprise as they have the mobile space? Dion Hinchcliffe think so. In a well-argued post he says business users are now conditioned to seek their own solutions: "Have a problem? There an app for that". He argues that although there are major corporate hurdles to overcome the sheer elegance of the app store approach will win out in the end.

Centralized and secure sharing of software and data that drives choice, competition, adoption, and consumption will almost certainly be a key element of the future success of SOA, SaaS, cloud computing, and mashups. How it will manifest itself and whether it will be standards-driven -- or as it's happening in the consumer world, vendor-driven -- is still up in the air. Whatever happens though, how enterprises acquire and use IT is about to change in a big way.

Meanwhile Google is said to be about to launch its own app store for business to encourage the adoption of many 3rd applications on it Google Apps platform.

Show us a better way

2008-07-29T19:26:00.001+01:00

The UK Cabinet Office has launched a site aimed at encouraging budding entrepreneurs to suggest cool things to do with public data - and it's offering a prize fund of £20k to grease the wheels...

Technorati Tags: Government

Magazine Napster

2008-07-24T22:31:00.001+01:00

The PPA is warning against a new web threat called Mygazines which has provided a platform for magazine subscribers to share their magazines with other users on the web - think of it like a Napster for magazines. The first targets seem to be consumer magazines - perhaps unsurprisingly - with the Economist, for instance, quite prominent. It will be interesting to see what happens next...

Technorati Tags: magazines, p2p

Google's Wikipedia competitor

2007-12-16T19:19:00.001+00:00

Google has launched a competitor to Wikipedia. Called Knol or Knols - we're not quite sure - it features articles (or "knols" - units of knowledge - written by a single author but voted upon by readers. Lifehacker points out that, now Wikipedia makes up the top result in such a large proportion of searches, it was inevitable that Google would want some of the traffic for itself. The Google account on the Official Google Blog, is here.

Technorati Tags: Google, wiki

2007-12-11T21:39:00.001+00:00

eWeek reports that business social networking site LinkedIn is opening up an API to allow developers to write applications that talk directly to the site.

when someone authorizes an application to use their LinkedIn account, the programmer can use their profile, their network, other LinkedIn profiles and network updates to improve the networking capabilities of that application.

For the BusinessWeek relationship, users can see how many users they know at companies mentioned in BusinessWeek articles, creating a mini social network of sorts based on industry news.

Developers can also use the platform to write applications that run inside LinkedIn.com, thanks to LinkedIn's support for and ability to leverage the APIs in Google's OpenSocial platform.

Programmers can create an application that uses their own user interface and back end and is augmented with the LinkedIn APIs. These applications will display within LinkedIn.com and will be aware of the current LinkedIn users and their networks. The applications will ultimately run on user's home and profile pages.

For example, someone could create a conference application that sits in LinkedIn to keep people abreast of upcoming industry events, and enables users to discuss the conference.

The move is made more interesting by the fact that the LinkedIn API will be compliant with Google's new Open Social standard.

Technorati Tags: productivity, APIs

Experience Strategies

2007-09-07T12:29:00.001+01:00

I'm at d.construct 2007 in Brighton and Peter Merholz, president of Adaptive Path is speaking. He discusses the problem of design as a pyramid with technology at the bottom, features in the middle, and at the top experience. Too often companies stop at either technology or features but it is experience (elegant simple solutions to complex products) is what marks out the great products. Apple famously exemplifies this, but "even" Microsoft is "getting it" with the latest version of Office (though as a Mac user he hasn't personally tried it!)

Thank God for the wii, he says - "now I don't just have to keep pointing to the ipod as a great example of user experience".

Products are people too, he says. There's a lot of research which shows that people interact with products the same way they do with other people. TiVo and Wii both have personalities provided by the manufacturers. We want to make cool products so what is it that makes people cool? They have integrity. The answer is what Tim O'Reilly as "designing from the outside in". You need an "experience vision" - Kodak's "you press the button, we do the rest" from 1880.

Palm succeeded where all others failed because it had a clear vision of where it was going - it designed the experience first, then added the features and finally decided on the technology.

Once the vision is written, adding a list of experiential requirements is a really useful way of developing the solution (allowing you to manage trade offs).

Technorati Tags: d.construct2007, user experience

The Business of Blogging

2005-06-28T09:02:00.000+01:00

The Business of Blogging is discussed in this article about Weblogs.inc which is setting out to prove there is a business model in blogs. Hope for BizBuzzMedia...

Bloggers taking cash for comment

2005-06-28T08:51:00.000+01:00

The Blog Herald reports a new way to make money from your blog: take cash from marketers for inline comments

Weblogs Inc

2005-06-23T06:38:00.000+01:00

PaidContent.org reports on the economics of Weblogs Inc saying they make up to $2,000 a day on Google ads and have higher CPM rates than network advertising. Interesting insight...

Bloggers - Wikiquote

2005-06-19T13:41:00.000+01:00

Wikiquote has an interesting list of reasons people blog...

Internet advertising estimates

2005-06-11T14:15:00.000+01:00

Merill Lynch estimates that online advertising could reach $12.4bn this year and paid search could be 45% of that...

Micro Persuasion: It's Not a Tumor, It's a Webzine

2005-06-10T08:55:00.000+01:00

eWeek reports moves to make RSS feeds more effective across platforms...

Yahoo! Mindset

2005-05-29T13:55:00.000+01:00

Yahoo! Mindset is an interesting attempt to refine searches based on intent - are you researching or buying - move the slider, and the results change accordingly...

Roadcasting

2005-05-23T22:12:00.000+01:00

A blog doesn't need a clever name describes "Roadcasting", the natural successor to Podcasting...

The New Gatekeepers, Part 7: Solutions | Civilities

2005-05-17T21:17:00.000+01:00

Jon Garfunkel writes a very thoughtful piece about how to quality-control the blogsphere. In it he argues for a system of classification of the major features of reliability of online content. Very interesting stuff. The other parts of The New Gatekeepers make interesting reading too, if you have time...

PaidContent.org

2005-05-11T19:31:00.000+01:00

PaidContent.org is an interesting blog that's worth subscribing to...

New infrastructure for web TV

2005-05-11T19:25:00.000+01:00

Participatory Culture Foundation has launched an inititiative to make web TV a powerful alternative to broadcast, with a desktop player and simple web publishing tool built on Blog Torrent.

The Wall Street Journal explains RSS

2005-05-06T06:36:00.000+01:00

The Personal Technology column of The Wall Street Journal has a really straight forward description on RSS and news readers....

OhmyNews

2005-04-10T10:35:00.000+01:00

OhmyNews goes international - experimenting with new forms of citizen journalism.

memeorandum: A newfangled news tangle

2005-04-05T13:16:00.000+01:00

memeorandum is another attempt to combine old and new (blog) media in one interface - this time spanning a wide range of sources not just one as in the case of the NY Times experiment...

The Annotated New York Times

2005-04-05T12:57:00.000+01:00

The Annotated New York Times is an interesting experiment combining the NYT with all the blog pieces inspired by it.

Blogspot beats the NY Times

2005-03-23T08:37:00.000+00:00

Interesting analysis using Alexa which shows that Blogspot is now eclipsing the New York Times in traffic...