Sony Experia S – NFC gets useful for profiles?

Posted: 14th March 2012 by boboshady in Digital Commentary, General Content, Professional
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If you think hard enough, you’ll remember a time when you had a Nokia mobile phone, probably without an ariel but not necessarily with a colour screen. If you took that phone with you everywhere, including to work, church or anywhere else that it was generally frowned upon to have it beeping, you would have been very adept at finding the ‘silent’ option. It’s quite likely you actually made use of the profiles option, and customised them to suit your needs.

Profiles were brilliant – you could specify a group of settings such as ringtone, message alerts, volumes, if vibration was turned on etc, which you could then select very quickly as your situation changed. Typical profiles put everything on silent for the ‘work’ setting, phone and message on silent but alarm on loud for the ‘night time’ setting etc. It was simple, useful, and has largely died out now.

Not that you can’t do it at all – many phones still do it out of the box and there’s plenty of apps for android and such that allow you to do similar things. You can also be intelligent about them on modern phones and tie the changing of such settings to your geolocation, so your phone will automatically pop into ‘work mode’ when you arrive at the office.

Not many people do it, however, and it’s not ‘out of the box’ for many devices (or even possible on some – take the iPhone for example, where basically you have ‘on’ or ‘off’ for your audio and such).

Enter the Sony Experia S – one of the latest offerings from Sony (no longer Sony Ericsson) and, as most future phones will be, equipped with NFC.

NFC is currently being punted as the next big thing in payment – much as contactless payment is slowly taking off in the UK (I’ve only recently been issued a card with it, and I love it for small payments where available), NFC on phones allows basically the same functionality as it’s basically the same technology.

I’m not going to go into any detail on payment though, because the Experia S comes with a ‘new’ use for NFC. Put simply, you can place NFC tags around your house and have the phone interact with them in different ways. For example, put one on your bedside table and when you put your phone on it, it will recognise the tag and change its settings according to your preferences.

The point? A welcome return to profiles – when the Experia S detects your bedroom tag, it changes to night time settings – alarms on, ringer off. Your office tag sets it to silent. Your car tag turns on bluetooth (which just needlessly sucks battery power all day if you leave it on unnecessarily) so it can connect to your handsfree and turns off WiFi, which you’re not going to need for a while.

NFC is not just for payment – it’s going to be very useful for very many things…profiles is probably one of the best right now, though.

Has it really been 5 months?

Posted: 13th March 2012 by boboshady in General Content, Tea
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Like the blogs of most, this one got very neglected very quickly. In my own defence, I basically moved my utterings to my company blog, blog.readingroom.com, so it’s not like I’ve been silent :) Still, I should really make at least a bit of an effort. I’m not even updating my tumblr account all that much (boboshady.tumblr.com), and twitter has largely been quiet from me for weeks (twitter.com/boboshady).

So, what have I been up to? Not much – work as been very busy and I’ve been reasonably ill for a few weeks now. As such, I’ve not had much time to do anything other than work and sleep – I could count the number of times I’ve made it to (or even close) to midnight and still been ‘up’ on one hand.

I’ve not killed zombies, not even created a random, pointless website, in AGES. And I don’t mean ‘ages’ in the youth of today sense, which could mean as little as 15 minutes – I mean months. Since before Christmas, even. That’s LAST YEAR.

I have once again started planning my book. Mostly, this planning has taken place on the toilet and during the hours I spend each month on public transport (not many – I only typically commute in that manner once a week, but it all adds up). Time will tell if I actually get around  to writing it.

Another thing I’ve not done in a while is think up a new concept. I’ve not even given a new, wanky name to an existing concept. I’ve stressed opinions over many current trends and ideas, but new ones have not been created by me for many, many weeks. I miss this part of my brain, and hope it will be back soon with the onset of wellness.

I must stress at this point that I’m hardly dying – I may talk at length about how ill I am, but actually it’s just been a cold, then a chest infection and now a likely throat infection. Annoying, disruptive, but hardly life threatening.

Anyway – I shall be looking to move this blog soon to my new server. I may not update it any more frequently that I am currently doing, but at least it will load a little faster :)

Second Layer Insight – Concept Launch

Posted: 22nd November 2011 by boboshady in Digital Commentary, General Content, Professional
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I won’t put the full post here, but it’s worth a cross-link – Today I launch the name of something you’re all going to care about in the future.

http://boboshady.tumblr.com/post/13156694331/second-layer-insight

Fag Packet Solution to the 2012 Olympics Transport Worries

Posted: 16th November 2011 by boboshady in General Content
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I read yesterday that Transport for London are throwing at least £6.5 billion at the transport infrastructure in and around London for the 2012 Olympics, and that there’s generally some worry that it’s not going to be enough. That is, it’s still going to be gridlock; so much so that there’s talk about asking companies to stagger working hours, relax rules on working from home and maybe some people should look at going on holiday for a few weeks?

It seems to be that there would have been a much better solution to all of this.

For clarity, I need to point out that these figures are approximate – I researched them, but only quickly and only using Google.

There’s 12.58 million people in the Greater London area, approximately 66% of whom are of working age (15 – 64). Let’s assume 100% employment, and we have a smidge of 8.3 million employed people.

Given an average London wage of £26,000, that gives a take home wage of approximately £20,042, or about £385.42 a week.

If we asked everyone who falls into the above employment bracket to just stay at home for two weeks, we’d have to pay them £770.84 (385.42 x 2).

That comes up to a total of around £6.4 billion – some £100 million cheaper than the current amount of cash being thrown at the London transport network, and an obvious saving. But of course it’s far more than that, because currently the estimated £6.5 billion spend will merely lessen the chaos and gridlock – my plan would remove 8million people from the streets of London for 2 weeks, keeping it nice and clear for tourists, olympians and journos alike.

And let’s not forget my numbers are also grossly understated – I’m assuming that every person aged between 15-65 in the Greater London area is employed here, which is quite frankly laughable. You could likely cut my budgeted cost in half (unless I’ve done my sums wrong somewhere!).

So there it is – how the transport worries for the 2012 Olympics could have been solved in an instance, and with no annoying roadworks, gridlock or exclusive lanes. I await my appointment to the Government.

 

Why no one cares that the Kindle is unreliable

Posted: 9th October 2011 by boboshady in Digital Commentary, General Content, I Like Moaning
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The wife mopped into the living room recently; Kindle in hand, downtrodden look on her face, the Kindle screen showing all the telltale signs of an LCD screen that has recently come second in a fight with a foot.

Yes – the worst had happened. the Kindle had been stood on and now is was deaded.

Despite purchasing the Kindle at Currys Digital, I decided to see if Amazon did any sort of easy repair or replacement scheme. once logged into amazon.co.uk, and after a few minutes hunting around for the relevant help page, I scheduled a call (yes, for them to call me – no waiting around in queues) which came through almost immediately.

I spoke with a guy called Pat for all of 5 minutes. During that time, we established that my Kindle was indeed broken and that such foot-related breakary wasn’t covered under their normal warranty (which is fair enough!).

Then he broke the good news – much like Apple do with their iPhone, no quibble replacement scheme, Amazon offer a replacement for 30% of the purchase price, assuming you send in your broken Kindle within 30 days.

About 3 minutes into the 5 minute call, we’d confirmed that I was happy to do that, my card was charged and a delivery was arranged for Tuesday coming. We spent the final 2 minutes going through the returns procedure for the old Kindle and generally being nice to each other.

Basically, a flawless customer service experience and a no quibble replacement at a reasonable cost, all within minutes of my initiating contact. I can’t imagine receiving such service anywhere else (although I’ve always rated Apple’s CS for their similar, no quibble approach to such things).

In this instance, I’m talking about a Kindle that was broken – by accident – but broken all the same. I do know of many people who have had random problems with their Kindles…screen freezes, software problems etc. Most of the people I and other people know who are Kindle owners have had some kind of issue before now. So why isn’t it constantly in the news? The Kindle is one of the most popular devices in the world (where available, at least)…so why aren’t people screaming about it?

Simply because of Amazon’s customer service approach. They speak to you very quickly and offer replacement after replacement. If it’s your fault, they replace at a very reasonable cost. If it’s their fault, they don’t argue…they just replace. And they send you a new one immediately and then give you 30 days to return the busted on at their cost.

it may sound like a very expensive way to keep people happy, but in doing so they are creating an army of dedicated followers who love their Kindles and know that the company who provides them will keep supporting them. They’re also mitigating any negative publicity about software and hardware problems and, in a world where customer service is always in the news, scoring major brownie points.

And this is why people love their Kindles and love Amazon, and why it really doesn’t matter that the product they’re selling is actually a bit crap.

HP Touchpad – the best marketing ploy ever seen?

Posted: 31st August 2011 by boboshady in Development, Digital Commentary, General Content, Professional
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Last week, I had an argument with a friend about HP’s decision to drop out of the hardware market and their attempts to shift warehouses full of unwanted HP Touchpad stock at the firesale price of £89 (or $99 in the US). I put forward the notion that, with the Touchpad launching with such tepid demand as to see global sales figures counted in the mere tens of thousands, HP decided to do something radical – create demand and swallow the cost. My friend was convinced that they were merely swallowing the cost of a failed device and getting rid of the evidence as quickly as possible.

It’s been widely reported that HP wiped 100million off their value simply by doing this, which certainly indicates a company licking it’s wounds and walking away from things as quickly as possible…but what if, in the middle of a long meeting to decide how to put the best possible spin on the disaster that was WebOS and the Touchpad, some brave executive put forward the following idea:

Let’s sell the Touchpads at a loss now but create massive interest in the device and WebOS.

Sound crazy? Maybe. But let’s look at the facts – HP have long desired to license WebOS out to partners, the problem being that no one is going to pay to put WebOS onto their hardware if there is no developer or consumer interest in the platform. If you create a market of millions of WebOS users, you do two things – create an instant audience, and get your product into the hands of people who will potentially love it and rave about it; people who you would otherwise not have engaged.

This makes perfect sense – As an original Pre owner I’ve always maintained that WebOS would be perfect on a tablet – if you can get it into the hands of the general public, they will love it and they will talk about it.

Let’s look at something else that could really demonstrate the strategic approach HP took here – total cost. Sure, they may have wiped 100million off their value by selling all their Touchpad stock at a loss…but they’re currently riding high in the tablet market place, with only the formidable iPad above them – to buy such a position within just two weeks of launch, globally, would have cost tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. 100million? That seems like an increasingly good deal.

I’m increasingly convinced that HP have cleverly turned what looked like a product launch disaster into something that could well place them as a major contender in the tablet and mobile market. WebOS had all the hallmarks of a fantastic platform, and now there’s the ready made audience of millions of owners who are there to spend money on apps, which will in turn attract developers, which will in turn attract licensing interest. All of that for a mere 100 million? Bargain.

Presence Overload

Posted: 14th August 2011 by boboshady in Digital Commentary, General Content, I Like Moaning
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I am one again reviewing my online presence – this blog was originally intended to be the first step in bringing everything together, and yet I find myself using it less and living more on twitter and, more recently, tumblr.

Well, I say I live more on those services…I’m actually using them less than I used to, also…but I feel like I like them more that a full-on blog. Twitter especially has become my primary online conversational tool.

To put some context around my current problem, here’s what I have that I use on a semi-regular basis:

  1. 5 email accounts, excluding my professional ones – I actually decided to move to one, managed address a while ago but I still have a handful of legacy accounts which I’ve not gotten around to updating my 15 years of digital subscriptions and accounts to.
  2. Lots – LOTS – of online presence – tumblr (3 accounts), facebook, Google+, twitter (3 accounts), linkedin.

I really can’t decide the best approach to bringing together all my email, nor the best solution to present myself online. I was hoping it would just work itself out when I accepted that it needed doing, but nothing’s concluded thus far. Dammit!

 

D is for ‘Doh’

Posted: 11th June 2011 by boboshady in General Content
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My laptop suddenly stopped registering left mouse clicks today. I feared the worst – a broken trackpad. I tried everything; rebooting, plugging in external mice, shutting down all applications that might be causing a conflict.

20 mins or so of googling later, it seemed that there was nothing but a trip to an Apple store for it. And then I saw a post from a very embarrassed person who had suffered a similar problem only to discover the cause was his magic mouse, tucked in his bag and still connected to his computer, with something prodding the left mouse button down.

The thing is…I have a magic pad upstairs which was still connected to the laptop even though I was downstairs, on the other side of the house.

Needless to say, once I’d removed the keyboard that was resting on top of it, my touchpad was working just fine again. *cough*.

A good advertisement for the range of bluetooth though, it has to be said.

General Technology Post/Rant

Posted: 9th June 2011 by boboshady in General Content, I Like Moaning
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Do you remember when we were all impressed if you could get 2 hours out of a laptop battery? I do – it wasn’t all that long ago…maybe 8 years. Nowadays, we pull our faces at 6-8 hours. This laptop is telling me I currently have only 2hrs 40mins left, and I’ve been using it for about 1hr 20mins already. Maybe I shouldn’t be running the screen so bright, or running 5 or 6 applications in the background…but still…less than 3 hours left? I’m still going to be awake after this dies!

And another thing – I have caught myself doing something I think I hate quite a lot recently – using the term ‘app’ to describe desktop applications. Grrrrr. It’s inevitable that everything will become an app, but still. Grrrrr.

And don’t get me started on laptops in general – I am highly miffed about people buying laptops nowadays – the manufacturers have cottoned on to what consumers are looking for – a big, 15.6inch screen, lots of RAM and HD space and see if you can’t stick ‘dual core’ or ‘latest Intel processor’ in the advert too. Then wrap it all up in the heaviest, most plasticky case in the world and couple it with a screen resolution that looked outdated on much smaller screens 3 years ago (1366 x 768 on a near 16″ screen? come on….).

And that’s before I even start talking about laptop battery life….

Your children will be DBA’s

Posted: 5th June 2011 by boboshady in Digital Commentary, General Content
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I had a brief but very interesting and thought-provoking discussion with the missus this weekend about how our generation will ‘remember’ their lives in fundamentally different ways to any before it. It was provoked by Google’s latest advert for Chrome, where a ‘dad’ is emailing his new born daughter the daily goings-on of her life for her to read in the future, and how ideas such as that will underpin how our memories are documented.

Continue reading on my company blog…

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