David Emery Online

Disruption

That’s what it’s all about.

Changing the norm.

Taking what is normal, established, run of the mill, day to day, obvious, traditional, straight forward.

Making them all look not only old fashioned, but ridiculous.

How did we ever think that was a good idea?

Don’t forget that most people won’t realise what you’ve done till after it’s too late.

Head in the sand.

Hands over ears.

Dead in the water.

Is there something new and popular that you don’t understand?

Too late.

You moved too slow.

Disruption ruins lives, and makes a better future.

Welcome to the social

As we surge relentlessly into the new year, the London tech scene is waking from its Christmas slumber and kicking off the year with a vengeance. First up tonight is Pub Standards XIV, which mostly involves going down the pub. That’s about it really.

It also looks like there’s another Geek Dinner in the offering for the end of January – I haven’t decided if I’m going yet but I’m sure it’ll be fun.

In February, however, it gets serious – after the success of the first one, BarCamp London 2 is happening 17th-18th. The last one was immensely interesting, so assuming I get my name on the sign-up (come on Ian, let us sign-up!) I’m very much looking forward to this one.

Directly after BarCamp is the Future of Web Apps Conference which I’ve somehow wangled a ticket for. With speakers including Michael Arrington, Kevin Rose, Khoi Vinh, Matthew Ogle and many more it should be very interesting. With both BarCamp and FOWA happening at the same time, I’m sure their will be some after hours events as well – it’s certainly looking pretty busy of the next few months…

TV Models

In an interesting twist to the ongoing change in TV broadcasting, Fox is bringing out a DVD of the first 4 episodes of 24 almost straight after they aired. It’s not too expensive – $14.98 – but seems to cement the idea that TV shows are something you charge for, as opposed to the traditional advertising subsidised model.

Obviously this ties directly in to digital downloads of TV shows; 24 is on the iTunes Store at $1.99 per episode, and is dominating the charts at #2, #4, #5 and #6. However, this obviously isn’t good enough for Fox for catching up people that missed the first episodes, hence the DVD.

It’s interesting to see that Fox are going down the pay-for-tv route almost exclusively – with the DVD being a stake in the sand declaring their intentions. This is in stark contrast to other US TV stations such as NBC, who are offering free, ad supported streams of their shows as soon as they air. Which of the two models is going to be more successful in the long term hangs on some key factors, chief of which is how people are actually going to watch these things.

With downloads from places...

Top 10 Mac Applications

Everybody loves lists.

Although I would hazard a guess that in actual fact everybody loves compiling lists. Ah well.

Here’s my top 10 favourite Mac applications, in alphabetical order:

Adium

While I do like iChat’s video and voice ability, Adium beats it in almost every other way. If you want to use either MSN or Gtalk it’s hands down the best client on the Mac, let alone if you want to use more than one protocol at once.

Of course, if it looked bad or or if the interface was poor then it would be a non-starter but Adium has one of the best interfaces around, packed full of customisability which is vital in a IM app. Not only can you customise the look of the buddy list, but you can completely change the look of the message window as well; amusingly enough the message window is built on WebKit (the rendering engine that powers Safari), so in fact you can change the look just by re-writeing the CSS!

Adium is also easily the best Twitter client as well – none of the other widgets and applications for Twitter seem to have got it quite “right” yet, and the integration with Growl for...

Interesting

One of my favourite blogs – Gapingvoid.com – is really on a roll right now; check out Hugh’s Random thoughts on being an entrepreneur. and Random Notes On Blogging.

Both of these are well worth your time.

While Hugh quite often writes things I disagree with, he always writes things that are thought provoking and interesting; being interesting is probably the most important thing you can be, these days.

•••

On a different note, the record industry seems to be heading into rocky waters, not that this is much of a surprise. It looks very much like EMI is in serious trouble, and could well take down several prestigious labels such as Parlophone and Mute with it, which would be a real shame. In similar news, V2 North America, home of The White Stripes, Moby and more in the states has laid off all its staff releasing all its artists from their contracts.

All this happening at the same time that an unsigned band has entered the UK top 40.

It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

•••

Finally, check out the some of the proposed elements and attributes in HTML 5 – the thinking seems to be to try...

Word Up

Almost completely lost in the jet-stream of the iPhone announcement was Microsoft’s announcement of Office 2008 for the mac which is shipping in the second half of the year. Before reading onwards, check out the pictures of the interface up on Appleinsider:

Quick-and-dirty snapshots of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac

I have to say, I’m really quite impressed. MacBU has managed to very effectively combine the ribbon as seen in Office 2007 for the PC with a “traditional” Mac interface. In fact, what it reminds me of most is Apple’s iWork suite – high praise indeed, as Apple are simply the best UI designers working today (you did see the iPhone interface, right?).

The Office 2008 was always going to be an interesting challenge. On the one hand, there was a pressing need to modernise the interface, as it was feeling quite out of date by current Mac interface fashions. On the other hand, the huge overhaul of Office 2007 on the PC must have caused a major dilemma over at Microsoft – it would be impossible to do a full version of the ribbon while maintaining the Mac look and feel, but some interface consistency across the two versions is...

Quiet/Busy

Sorry for the lack of posts.

I’m simply too busy.

More posts soon.

And the fruits of my labours, but not for a few months yet…

Reinvention + Revolution

I think only Apple could have such a huge amount of hype for an unannounced product, and then manage to make a product that is even better.

The Apple iPhone

It’s truly an astonishing product.

I am just in awe at the user interface; not only is it the best mobile interface by a country mile, it’s the best computer interface I’ve seen full stop. The integration of animation into every part of the UI really makes it a huge step forward, and a preview of what we have to come in Leopard – which I’m sure we’ll see more of later this month, along with iLife/iWork ‘07.

Obviously there was no point looking at things like Leopard, or new Mac hardware in this keynote as they would have been completely overshadowed by the iPhone; even the tv (not liking the new name), which is a very interesting device has been virtually ignored.

What’s going to be most interesting to see is how open it is to developers. For a start it has built-in Safari, so it’s yet another smaller screen size that web-devs have to accommodate. It also appears to support Dashboard Widgets (which are based on the Safari rendering engine, WebKit),...

Social Suicide

According to Valleywag, TagWorld is having major problems, with both of its founders having gone awol.

This really comes as no surprise.

The social network market has become incredibly densely populated, and not populated by well thought out, interesting, innovative companies; it’s densely populated by MySpace clones – note for note, feature for feature MySpace clones. Tagworld was one of the worst – it really is pretty much identical – but there are hundreds out there; some of them slightly better, with one or two interesting features, but all of them missing the point.

A social network is all about people – nothing to do with features, design or anything like that. All you have to have is that critical mass of people, and to do that you have to have a genuine differentiator, something that truly sets you apart. Not some “innovative” feature tacked on the side of a MySpace rip-off.

And a social network without people is worse then nothing.

Although, a social network without people (but with claimed people, like Tagworld) really is much worse then nothing for a certain set of people:

Bands.

You’re a struggling band, trying to get signed. You’ve got a MySpace page (obviously), but you want...

Predictions

Unless you live on the Moon – actually, I’m bet even they know, better make it ex-planet Pluto – you’ll know it’s the Macworld Expo in San Fransico next week. As is required by any blogger who occasionally writes about Apple things here’s my predictions for what we’re going to see in the keynote on Tuesday:

• iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07: After a few consecutive years of iLife/iWork updates at Macworld it would be more surprising if we didn’t get new versions next week. I don’t however, think they’re going to be the most interesting updates ever; Charts/Numbers is a bit of a given for iWork, but like Pages it’ll be good but not compelling enough to make people switch from Microsoft Office.

  In iLife, iWeb will almost certainly get the most attention – it needs it. More themes, less reliance on .mac, cleaner markup and urls are all desperately needed. I’m interested in seeing if they come up for a decent solution for video cataloguing/storing – both iPhoto and iTunes do it, but neither do it too well. Also, expect the whole suit to get the same look as iTunes 7

• Mac OS X 10.5: I’m sure that 10.5 will be...