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Picture this, you’re sitting in a Kuala Lumpur food court. You scan a QR code, browse the menu, tap to order, and pay with a mobile app. Human interaction, zero. Time to order, thirty seconds. Your lunch arrives hot, possibly what you ordered (this is Malaysia, after all), with zero fuss. Now imagine you’re in…
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I’ve just checked my Google Photos storage. Again. There are 16.07 GB of photos accumulated since 2013. That’s twelve years of digital memories: blurry shots of meals I can barely remember eating, screenshots of things I thought were important at the time, and approximately forty-seven photos of the same sunset from different angles, as if…
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Pretty much everything anyone would ever want to know about product placement on the silver screen was covered in Morgan Spurlock’s excellent documentary The Greatest Story Ever Sold. If you haven’t watched that yet please do, it will change the way you view movies and TV forever. Re-watching Ozu’s Tokyo Story the other day I…
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Visited a friend’s workshop this week. “Hey James,” He said. “You know a thing or two about computers – can you help us fix one of the PCs?” Apparently the machine in question was running slow and kept losing connection to the network. This is what I found: And after five minutes gentle cleaning with…
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I am the lowest denominator of frustrated musicians, one who can barely play a note. To give you an idea of exactly how terrible I sound when in charge of a musical instrument my party piece is the descending dervish riff of Interstellar Overdrive, played on one string. Though I’m not tone deaf, possess a…
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News that a group of enterprising Shanghainese individuals had been caught cobbling together fake iPhones from genuine parts and flogging them off on the streets of China reminded me of my days sourcing cellphones from this part of the world. A few years back I was engaged in a project to buy cheap mobiles from…
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The one feature that unifies each and every Social Network is, rather obviously, making connections. Likewise, regardless of platform or Operating System, the feature that unifies the means by which you communicate from a connected device is an address book. It’s the feature you use without thinking about it. How often have you heard people…
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In first world telecoms Voice is being commoditised to feature status. If further proof were needed this week the folks behind Bluebox released their latest offering, the 2600hz Project, a cloud-based telephony service that promises easy access to: “Anything you can do with VoIP, for now – with SMS and video coming shortly.” Describing…
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The development community is failing to learn from failure. Instead of recognizing these experiences as learning opportunities, we hide them away out of fear and embarrassment. That’s a great piece of copy. Plain common sense denotes that we should learn from our mistakes, though it seems that in the start up world we rarely do.…
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Passion is probably the most worn-out word in our great start-up culture. My favourite comment on this particular linguistic occupational overuse syndrome comes from award-winning magazine editor David Hepworth: “If you wanted to fly somewhere and were offered a choice between one pilot who was capable and another who was immensely passionate about every aspect…