My daughter begins high school next week. And as she does, the Federal government and the various state governments continue to trumpet their triumphs in their so-called Building the Education Revolution plan. As yet, I’ve seen no revolution from this program, and little evolution. Mostly just reactionary, frightened implementation of the laptops for high schoolers program […]
Big Iron at the Australian Open
Image by trib via Flickr On Monday this week, IBM flew me to the Australian Open for a day at the tennis and a behind the scenes view of the technology they provide to this and other events in their role as the key technology provider. It was all done under the aegis of my […]
Kindle didn’t start the fire…
Apologies to readers for misquoting a Billy Joel song title. And the terrible pun. My friend, Kate Carruthers has an interesting post about sitting next to an elderly gentleman on a recent flight and hearing his views on the change the Amazon Kindle is bringing to the book publishing industry. As a Kindle owner of just […]
Open, but not enough of the right stuff
Over at his blog and at Read Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick has taken the folks at data.gov to task for inflating the real numbers and nature of the data the US government is making publicly available. Marshall conclues that the data.gov number of approximately 168,000 datasets is inflated because approximately 99.4 per cent of that […]
It’s the (news) network, stupid
Stowe Boyd has it pretty much spot-on in his analysis of the New York Times’ announcement that it’s moving to a freemium model in 2011. Over at Reuters, the ever-eloquent Felix Salmon has his own, equally dark view of the move by the NYT, noting his belief it will do them no end of damage. […]
Elevator
I often struggle when asked to give my elevator pitch — there are so many things I think about and want to do. But it’s more than time I did it, so here goes nothing… What’s acidlabs mean? acidlabs is about ideas. With the name, I wanted to create something that attracted attention. That’s worked just fine, […]
Focussing on the voice of the customer
When we’re designing products, applications and services, we always bang on about how important it is to consider the customer, or user (I’m going to use those terms interchangeably in this post). But just how much do we really consider them? And how often do we compromise in favor of some product or business limitation? […]
2010 vision
Many folk I know have been discussing their 2009 challenges and victories and looking forward to what 2010 has in store for them. I’ve felt the need to at least review and refresh, but knew I had to get my thoughts in order first. This post is just a first pass at doing so for me […]