Techiedog-blog

As the working year draws to an end, so too does my current employment contract, which started nearly seven years ago when I joined Freeserve - which re-branded to Wanadoo after France Telecom acquisition and then changed name again to Orange earlier this year. Its been an interesting ride from fresh faced Dot Com to corporate monster. I initially joined Freeserve (after being pursued for some time by a rabid pack of recruiters) because it seemed like a place with pockets suitably deep enough to offer some shelter from the dot com bubble bursting. However, having made the transition from senior producer to Innovation and technology consultant early on in my tenure I must admit that it turned out to be far more fun than I anticipated. But now, the time is right to once more venture forward under my own steam, so its back into the heady world of freelance consultancy and start-up stress. So, I'm going to enjoy a Christmas break at get stuck in on Jan 2nd 2007 when the hang overs...

Due to fatherly responsibilities I had to cancel my trip to Le Web 3 at the eleventh hour and I kinda feel that in the end I lucked out. Thus I legitimately get to avoid passing comment on the event which by all accounts was hijacked by French political agendas. There is little point my adding anything to the TCUK debacle 'cept to point you at a couple of posts from my homies. Monoman: TCUK Farrago Imran: Le Web day 1 I was however in IM contact with several of my friends and colleagues who were less than impressed. If you want to know more, tap into the blogosphere - it's rife with comment.

I have, at various times in my career, been tasked to look into the viability and functional specifications of backup systems for domestic computing. There are some pretty good technical solutions out there but this is never an easy sell to the end user. Until you have had a bit of kit go bang, you can't really appreciate the trauma of loosing its contents and capabilities. Would everyone really buy car insurance if it wasn’t compulsory or would they gamble on their driving prowess or the grace of St Christopher? Even now, when the personal generation and collation of digital media in ever greater quantity on our computers suggests we have more to loose, few indulge in regular back up activities and fewer still are prepared to pay to do so. To this end I am not sure that backup is something that can or should be sold to the domestic users (there are all sort of compulsions on the corporate world). Rather it perhaps makes sense to charge for retrieval or restoration. Save for the ob...

For a few years now one of my research domains has concerned the Future of Home Networking . My interest in this area of technology was I guess, initially sparked as a geeky 10 year old hacking away at my ZX81 with an imagination fuelled by Lucas , Roddenbury et al. So when I was asked to deliver a keynote at last week’s inaugural Wireless Grids Research Consortium Meeting on the topic of visions for the use of Grids in the home environment, starting with the mental exercise of deconstructing the Star Trek ship's computer seemed only too natural. From HAL to the USSS Enterprise and beyond, the intelligent Star Ship Computer has become a cliché staple of Science Fiction writing and film. Be the question ‘Computer, what deck is Mr Spok currently on?’ or ‘How long before that planet explodes?’ the Star Ship computer has the answer. However the computer doesn’t ‘know’ all the answers, it simply ‘understands’ the question, ‘knows’ where to find the information required to present a...