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February 26th, 2009

Lego has the coolest business cards

lego_card

See Pos­i­tive Shar­ing for details.

So how much do you want to work for Lego right now? (Or at any time for that matter.)

February 5th, 2009

Are these the best business books of all time?

ChangeThis has been invit­ing peo­ple to nom­i­nate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chap­ter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Business Books

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

January 7th, 2009

Is this the beginning of an Apple Netbook?

a-netbookNet­books are big news just now – the ball that ASUS set rolling with the eeeeeeeeeeepc has swept almost all the other lap­top man­u­fac­tur­ers along with it (as well as cre­at­ing a few new entrants along the way). With one notable excep­tion – Apple.

Steve Jobs has been quoted as say­ing that Apple will wait and see how the mar­ket devel­ops. In the mean­time we’ve seen new 17″ Mac­Book Pro’s announced – which are as about as un-netbooky as it’s pos­si­ble to get in a lap­top. Then there are the rather lovely new exter­nal screens to go along with the rather lovely Mac­Book Air – both of which our very own Rod Ban­ner has had grac­ing his desk in the office (ah the perks of being the Chair­man).

July 7th, 2008

DIY touchscreen netbook

Giz­modo points to a video of an EeePC 900 tricked out to fea­ture a pretty nifty touch screen inter­face. Nice. I can’t wait to see what the emerg­ing net­book mar­ket turns up by the end of the year, there’s so much going on there right now.

March 15th, 2007

A little more on multitouch

AppleIn­sider has an arti­cle on the wider pos­si­bil­i­ties of mul­ti­touch for Apple beyond the iPhone. While the posi­tion­ing of this as being a “mega-platform” feels a lit­tle like jar­goni­tis, the idea makes per­fect sense.

The arti­cle is more focused on the effect this could have on Apple’s share price than on cus­tomers but the change in pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence is surely the big story here.

March 9th, 2007

Multitouch goes large

Regard­less of where you stand on the iPhone, it was hard to remain unim­pressed by the demo of the mul­ti­touch screen. Watch­ing Steve Jobs pinch­ing pho­tos smaller and big­ger was a real oooo moment. (Although, putting it that way makes it sound a lit­tle underwhelming.)

Now, it looks like we might get this tech­nol­ogy on a large scale. Jeff Han, one of the brains behind mul­ti­touch has cre­ated a new com­pany Per­cep­tive Pixel to develop large screen ver­sions of the tech­nol­ogy. You can see a pretty mes­meris­ing video here:

You can also see Jeff demon­strat­ing the tech­nol­ogy back in Feb­ru­ary 2006 at TED.

January 19th, 2007

O Lord, won’t you buy me, an Apple iPhone

I con­fess. Mine is one of the ani­mated voices debat­ing the future of Apple in the mobile phone indus­try. But I’m the heretic deny­ing that we’re wit­ness­ing the birth of the Mobile Mes­siah. I have much love for Apple (even if sit typ­ing this on a Sony Vaio). They have a knack of dis­rupt­ing mar­kets through intel­li­gent and beau­ti­ful design. And the desir­abil­ity of their brand is sec­ond to none. So they should be well placed to thrive in the mobile phone busi­ness. Right?

November 17th, 2006

One for the Xmas list

So, 0 to 60mph in 4 sec­onds, 130mph top speed and… it’s elec­tric. This is the Tesla Road­ster and I want one.
tesla_overhead_800×600.jpg

To me, it looks a bit like a Lotus Elise – which is no bad thing (the site has some nice eye candy on it). It has a 250 mile range which coun­ters one of the real lim­i­ta­tions of pre­vi­ous elec­tric cars. The only prob­lem is that it’s left hand drive… oh, and comes in at about $100k… and it’s sold out any­way. But if it wasn’t for all that…

Here’s some video taken at the launch:

August 31st, 2006

Hack this

Chumby

This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the impor­tant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the lat­est news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).