- Blog
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Microsoft’s turn for a kicking again
I know it’s always Microsoft’s turn but the ‘Microsoft=dinosaur’ stuff always intensifies in the run-up to a big Windows release. Search The Economist‘s archive and you’ll find a big ‘is Microsoft finished?’ think piece in the months preceding the release of Windows 95, Windows 2000 and, now, Vista. The latest one is worth a read,…
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The next SMS?
A friend of mine just told me about USSD. Of course, you already knew about USSD – it’s been in the GSM spec since the beginning (like SMS). It’s a sort of session-based SMS. It has a few current uses – like querying your pre-paid balance – but no economic model (there’s no way of…
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An ad idea
Mark Cuban – who should get over himself, by the way – has had a brilliant idea: live TV ads. The more I think about it the more I like it. Wow. Live TV ads. Yeah.
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The survivor…
In May 2002 I wrote this piece for The Guardian. In it I celebrated the unlikely survival of the big, dumb, general-purpose PC – over-determined, over-specced and over here. Four years on… Gordon Bennet. Would you credit it… it’s still here… Not so big, slightly less dumb but even more general-purpose. As before, though, there’s…
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You’ve heard of Jazz Hands…
This is a real product. What were they thinking?
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Calendar stuff
30boxes is awesome. Why did I hesitate? I have no good reason to use a desktop calendar any more – although I guess I’ll keep iCal synched up to 30boxes for those moments I’m offline and for when I want to synch with the phone. 30boxes provides the kind of piece-of-cake management and synchronisation that…
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Sort of weekendy blog stuff
Thinking about it, poetry might be the best application of podcasting yet. I suppose that poetry is about as close to music as language gets and listening to poetry in my ‘don’t-even-think-about-talking-to-me’ public transport bubble on the daily commute is qualitatively much like listening to The Flaming Lips or Schubert or Mrs Mills (although I…
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Remembering Tony Blair, part one
Tony Blair ignored, neglected and ultimately abused the party that gave him power. He was right to do so. In the early 1990s Tony Blair saw that the Labour Party in its fossilised 1980s form was not only unelectable but, worse, no longer an electoral force. The Labour Party was going the way of the…
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What is our problem with entrepreneurship?
I wrote a piece for the supplement that accompanied The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit last week: What is an entrepreneur? “A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so”. The dictionary definition will do but it doesn’t come close to taking in…
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Rupert Murdoch wants me to move
To America, in fact…