In the continuing fight for the greater availability of public information, it may seem churlish to observe that sometimes what’s wanted is not more information, but less. The picture above shows a typical display on a Countdown sign at a London bus stop. This particular stop has buses from two routes. At a quick glance, [...]
Some evenings on my way home from work, I play a small private game of chicken. Now I have played it for the last time. If there are too many people at the bus stop – and no, I don’t know how many makes too many – that’s a sign that the gap between buses [...]
Networked societies and networked economies rather depend on there being a network. We only tend to notice them when they are not there or not working. On my wired connection at home, there is decent bandwidth with very occasional catastrophic failure. On my wired connection at work, there is what feels like very limited bandwidth shared [...]
Truncating the axes is the oldest trick in the book, so the story this chart is telling is not quite as dramatic as the initial visual impression, but that story is still striking and important. The proportion of internet usage from mobile devices is tiny, less than 3%. That’s almost certainly an understatement, since the [...]
My post last week on apps for elephants has prompted some interesting discussion. Steph Gray had some eminently sensible practical thoughts on how government could balance the need to adapt to changing demands with the need to support openness and flexibility: Of course Government should be developing smartphone apps (though probably not iPhone exclusively) as [...]
The government is an elephant, as I have noted before. It tries to dance, but finds it hard, and the smaller animals around it can get hurt. The solution may be for the elephant to stand stock still, to do nothing for fear of treading on something more nimble, but more easily hurt. Or it [...]
Mobile has been the imminent future for quite a few years now. Now quite suddenly the mobile web feels very different for three important reasons.
This time next year, it will be difficult to tell the difference between a website and a mobile application. Premasagar Rose, quoting an unnamed participant at Over the Air
It’s the time of year for electoral registration. For the last couple of years, my council has offered a rather clunky web service, not designed to inspire confidence – indeed barely designed at all – but fully functional nonetheless. This year, I can register by text message – just a case of sending a ten [...]
Back in the big city, life is speeding up again. I don’t have to get into a car to buy a newspaper. The nearest station is ten minutes’ walk away, not fifteen miles of twisty roads away. And my downstream speed is 5.7 Mbps, just over a hundred times faster than the 56kbps I could [...]