David Emery Online

Buy Buy Buy

To follow their YouTube acquisition, Google have now bought JotSpot, one of the leading provider of Wiki-based collaboration software.

This is another very, very clever move by Google; they’ve really turned around in the last few months – from looking like they were slowly but surely loosing their edge with misfires like Google Page Creator and Google Video, with their recent purchases they’re looking a lot stronger. JotSpot is a company with a very compelling product suite – while “wiki” is the headline buzzword, JotSpot not only has refined the concept, they’ve also added a boat load of collaboration features that make the product really compelling to enterprise and business use.

So what’s cooking over at Google? This is obviously another piece in the “Google Office” puzzle, which now comprises a word processor, a spreadsheet, email, calendar, collaboration suite, chat and more. The collaboration aspect of this is going to be the killer blow here, I think – which is why this purchase makes a whole load of sense. Certainly where I work Word and Excel are used as not much more then rich text editors and basic number crunchers – the small amount of features that “Google Office” may lack...

Pricing Strategy

While on lunch today I saw something rather amusing that I thought I’d share with you all; it is a Monday after all, and who doesn’t need a bit of amusement on a Monday?

Any ideas how much that rather small Milky Way is? And for my American readers, that’s a UK Milky Way, which is like an American 3 Musketeers bar – what they call a Milky Way in America is actually a Mars bar. Madness.

Anyway. Pricing. Yes. Any guesses?

How about this?:

Personally, I this point in the shopping experience I just gave up. Obviously the price labels could not be trusted; luckily these choc-filed delights had their prices on them, but nothing else did. How would I know what price they were?

For the record, the prices on the bars were the prices paid; after recovering from the temporary pricing confusion I decided there was only one option: buy* both bars even though I don’t like them to find out the truth.

I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.

* Except I didn’t actually – James did. But he doesn’t have a blog.

Music Habits

Much to the consternation of many people I know, I don’t have a record player. Not only that, I don’t have a CD player either, other then in a computer. All of my music listening happens via iTunes, either through an amp connected to my computer or though my iPod.

It suddenly hit me the other other day that my CD collection is now not going to get any bigger.

I don’t buy CDs any more.

All of my new music is digital – whether it comes from iTunes, downloaded from a blog or straight off a MySpace page (for all of its faults, it’s a good place to hear new music).

Once the music is in iTunes, I have a fairly sophisticated set of playlists all geared to maximise the music in my library. To start with, I can’t remember when I last listened to an “album” – I only listen to playlists, and they’re always on shuffle. As a side note, I think this may be slowly but surely having an effect on my music taste; I used to abhor instrumental music, finding it quite boring, but now an album such as Ratatat’s Classics ends up working really well as separate...

Possibilities

Mobile phones currently have a rough idea of where they are, and soon GPS is going to start becoming a standard feature. Couple with this the addition of a simple compass and gyroscope set-up, so the phone knows which way it’s pointing.

Add to this a large screen, a camera and a high speed internet connection – many mobiles have all this already.

Then you’ve got something that could change the world.

Imagine holding up your phone, and seeing information being overlaid in real time over the top of the view from your camera. You might be walking down a high street; holding your phone up could overlay street names and directions above roads, show star ratings above restaurants and highlight prices and stock levels of a shop without you even having to go in.

Think of the possibilities this opens up – combine it with IM and have a visual indication of where your buddies are on screen; think of when you’re trying to find someone at a gig, for example – it’s loud, dark and busy. You could just hold up your phone and see a big arrow floating over their head.

You could very easily couple this with RFID to allow you...

Adapt or Die

Jason Calacanis, he of Weblogs Inc and Netscape fame, has just posted about how feed readers shouldn’t show adverts next to full text feeds. Essentially, the thrust of his argument is that websites – online feed readers such as Bloglines included – shouldn’t be allowed to make money off of their content.

I haven’t seem someone so well known and so respected say something this stupid in a long time.

For a start, the argument is full of holes; does this extend to desktop feed readers showing ads? What about if you browse to their site using a browser that shows ads? Is that “unfair” as well? How about all those feed readers that cost money? They’re benefiting from your feeds – if someone uses NetNewsWire which costs $29.99 and subscribes to your full text feed, should you get a cut of that $29.99?

Of course not.

This whole concept is quite absurd – if you don’t want people using those feeds, don’t put them out there. Once you’ve made the decision that you see a benefit in distributing your content in this way, you can’t start to try and artificially limit how people use it; it just won’t work. If your...

The Early Years

At work we’ve just launched a new site for The Early Years, a lovely bunch of guys from London who’re on Beggars Banquet.

I’m particularly pleased (if I do say so myself!) how this site turned out; we got given a whole load of really nice photos from the band and we really wanted to incorporate them at the core of the site, as they really represented what the band is about. We ended up using yet more javascript wizardry to dynamically scale the background photos to fit the size of the browser window, and then took advantage of transparent pngs (with gif fallback on IE) to layer content on top.

It is, or course, another site based on a Textpattern back end. It’s got to a point now that implementing a band site in Textpattern really takes no time at all, such is Textpattern’s flexibility coupled with a few choice plugins ( upm_img being the most notable).

Art Comment

Revisiting my recent post Art is Bollocks I visited the Turner Prize Exhibition this weekend. As for the art, their were few surprises – Rebbeca Warren and Mark Titchner’s work were both inconsequential; nothing special; nothing interesting. Tomma Abts’ paintings were probably the highlight – their abstract nature combined with the layered and built-up texture inherent with the medium was really something special.

Phil Collins’ work was sadly incomplete; as I was visiting on a Sunday the office he’s constructed as part of the exhibit was empty, leaving the focus being on one of his video works focusing on the effects of reality television on it’s participants. I think his work is probably the most innovative of all the nominees – the most deserving of the prize – but personally I have a real problem with video work presented in a gallery setting; to me, it’s just not the right atmosphere to experience tele-visual arts. You inevitably don’t see the piece from the start, joining it halfway through, and often (as with the exhibit at the Turner Prize Exhibition) you have to stand – or worse, loiter as people mingle past.

The most interesting thing to me was not, however, the...

Scenester Happenings

The Geekdinner last night was really good fun – it’s always nice to get together with like minded people for a drink, and it’s nice to hear that there’s going to be a big geek Christmas party in December, again organised by the tireless Ian (who took the pic above, I must add).

One interesting thing that became apparent last night, however, is how dominant Yahoo! is becoming on the London geek social scene. A significant proportion of the attendees either work for Yahoo! or are just about to, which is certainly interesting. I have to say I’m not the biggest Yahoo! fan – can you think of something Yahoo! has done that’s genuinely interesting or innovative? Sure, they’ve bought a lot of interesting companies, but does that make them interesting themselves?

I can see Yahoo! being one of the bigger casualties when this bubble bursts – they’ve really invested heavily in the Web 2.0 hype, with little advantage gained as yet. Sure, Flickr is popular with the geeks, but it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet and it may well never. While they’ve bought a lot of interesting companies, they’ve conspicuously missed out on all the big buys – MySpace...

Internet Explorer 7

So, Internet Explorer 7 is finally out. Yes, it’s obviously much better then version 6; no, it’s still not great – certainly no better then Firefox or Opera. It does, however, have quite a few nice touches – the integration of RSS works nicely, and will surely mean that RSS adoption gets much larger. Also, I think the tab implementation is really quite nice; while it’s nothing revolutionary, the tab preview function works well as does the tab menu.

I do think though that both IE and Firefox 2 are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to the way they handle a large amount of tabs; both these browsers present left and right arrows that let you scroll through tabs if you have too many to fit on the screen and it’s a piece of UI that in my opinion just doesn’t work well. If you really have a lot of tabs, scrolling though them using scroll arrows is an exercise in frustration. OmniWeb is currently the only browser that I think gets tabs right – using tab thumbnails which scroll vertically works incredibly well, allowing you to manage a large amount of tabs easily.

So, what now?

With Internet...

Scenester

As pointed out by Ian there’s an article on the recent BarCamp London in this months .net magazine.

Yes, that is me taking up most of the page.

Yes, I do look quite a lot like a chipmunk.

Yes, they do use the picture three times.

It’s certainly nice to be in the pages of a magazine, but they could have used a nicer picture. Oh well. For some context, it was taken during my talk on Digital Music, and left to right that’s Matt Patterson, Ben Ward, Steve Marshall and me (the chipmunk).

Photography aside, it’s really nice to see BarCamp London being featured in the pages of a magazine – it was a really great event and deserves more publicity. If you go and check out Ian’s blog you’ll see that at the moment there’s a huge amount of activity in the UK “geek” scene – this week I think there’s an event every evening, and looming on the horizon is another BarCamp and and Christmas Geek Party.

I think all this activity is indicative of a very interesting “movement” happening here in the UK. Recently it’s often been pointed out that London – and the UK in general...