Bad Company: Plusnet

“Hello, Mr. Stokoe, I’m afraid I have an apology to make – we spoke on Tuesday night but I forgot to save the comments onto your account, can you remind me what we were discussing?” said Mike from painfully incompetent ISP, Plusnet, a subsidiary of BT.   18 Months Earlier… The adverts were full of it, […]

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Google’s Project Loon

Google are doing a lot of “10X innovation” right now. That is innovation that isn’t just incrementally better than the competition (like a 10% improvement) but a moon-shot, 10-times improvement. One of these initiatives is called Project Loon: You can sometimes see these balloons being tested off the coast of Christchurch, New Zealand, on FlightRadar, […]

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Swatch Internet Time on Your Desktop

I’ve spoken before about Swatch Internet Time as an option for solving the horrible problems of cross-timezone collaboration. But nobody is adopting it. There are good reasons for this: it’s not overly difficult to work out timezone differences, there are more intuitive alternatives such as using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and ultimately nobody is betting […]

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How to Take a Good Photo

Christmas is almost upon us and pretty soon the flood of pictures of Uncle Bob in his reindeer jumper will reach its peak. Photography is a very simple thing, you just point and click, right? And with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and other devices you’d have thought that learning how to take a good […]

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Natural Disaster Magnet

I’m no dare devil, in fact, I’m pretty risk averse, and yet I’ve managed to be in the wrong place at the right time to experience some of nature’s most destructive forces first-hand. I’m a natural disaster magnet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not your average storm-chaser. I don’t have a souped up pick up […]

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