Thursday, 8 July 2010

Seamless social media interaction

Lots of apps make it fairly straightforward to post updates to your social networks, but it's never totally seamless - for example if you take a photo and then want to upload it to a social network you typically have to go to an app, and select the photo to post, involving at least a few clicks.

Mashmobile have an interesting solution where essentially they run a small web server on the phone, which amongst other things can offer RSS feeds from your phone direct to other services.  So your social network could be pulling photos straight off your phone without you having to do anything at all.  Likewise videos, location - whatever data your phone can generate.

I'm sure most people want the ability to filter / edit before publishing, but it's definitely an interesting way of easing friction out of the publication process.  

The other huge advantage of running a web server on the phone is that you can offer a way to manage the phone from a PC.  This could have endless uses, from making it easier for you and me to set up the phone the way we want it, through to operator and enterprise management facilities.  It also helps with inclusiveness (as discussed at Senior Market Mobile this week), because you'd be able to set up accessibility options on your phone from an already accessible PC.

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

The phone charger mountain

According to Ian Hay from Orange (talking at the Senior Mobile Conference), we've made 11-12 billion mobile phone chargers. Wow.

Thank goodness for a universal solution. Which is agreed for 'the majority' of handset sales by 2012.

Now when's the universal laptop charger coming?

Wednesday, 30 June 2010

New release of Qlockwork Pro

If you're an Outlook user, and you wonder where your day goes, then Qlockwork from WorkingProgram is for you.  One of the projects I've been working on recently is this week's launch of the new Pro version which adds several new features.  There's a free trial available, so why not give it a spin and find out where you're spending your time?

 

Friday, 25 June 2010

A mysterious superfluity of captcha's

Regular readers might notice a new look to my site - courtesy of Blogger's template design service. Now that you can host extra pages as well as your main blog, Blogger is a decent solution for a basic website.  I've been migrating my static pages from a paid service so that they're now hosted for free, courtesy of Blogger / Google.  Nice.

But why, oh why, do we have to enter a Captcha every single time you want to make a change to your blog's hosting settings?  You can't hit the Save Settings without entering yet another captcha.  Can't it remember I'm a human, even just for 5 minutes, while I sort everything out?