Category Archives: reactions

Young Rewired State finals

After some serious queueing, Emma is doing her bit on stage, thanking sponsors and staff, as we wait to hear who has made it through to the finals. I’ll try to keep a record of the presentations as they go, wifi permitting… 15:50 Emma announcing the winners! Five in each prize stream… Was trying to […]

Young Rewired State showdown

There’s nothing like a bit of last-minute chaos to calm a presenter’s nerves. And what with the flooding, the inevitable wifi complications and the delay in starting, I am surprised to see that our teams of 15, 16 and 17 year-olds are taking this all in their stride. It’s day six, the main event, of […]

The experience of Codecademy

Codecademy has been getting some great reactions from my friends who don’t code that much, but have been meaning to get into it (which is everyone, right?). I had a little look when it first went up, and remembered thinking that the method was really clever, but I didn’t spend time going through any exercises. […]

The Chromebook & me

I just went to have a look at the Chromebook in the “Chrome Zone” at Tottenham Court Road’s PC World / Curry’s. I’ve resisted buying a tablet for more than a year, despite my gadgety inclinations, because of the general lack of keyboard, 3G and access to the software I use to do my job. […]

Twitter’s new image upload feature & your rights

Yesterday, Twitter launched its own image uploading service, which competes directly with TwitPic, yFrog and the like. Whilst this is all very interesting for those guys, one of the important things to know about before making use of this service is what rights you have to any images you upload. Remember the fuss when TwitPic […]

1000 days of Airbnb or “how to get press”

I just watched a video from November last, of an Airbnb founder, Brian Chesky, talking about the first 1000 days of his company. It’s one of those times when I’d had the browser tab open for about two weeks before getting to it, but I’m glad I did. In case you don’t know Airbnb, Brian […]

The experience of bad coffee

“Two cappuccinos please”. I see the operator pick up two cardboard cups. They have a terrible pattern on them. So I say, “Sugar in one please”. I’m hedging my bets. “Brown.” The ground coffee comes out of the hopper without a whiff. There is a light tamp, if you can call it that, when it […]

Kurt Vonnegut & Destructive Testing

I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut’s fantastic Breakfast of Champions at the moment. It’s the kind of book you can sail through, and reading it feels like unboxing a load of toys. About half way through (where I am now), he has one of the lead characters, a man called Dwayne, who is going crazy, tell a […]

Employee effect on the world’s biggest companies

I was wondering on Saturday how you could reasonably compare a large company with a loose band of freelancers, where the word “employee” doesn’t operate. I dug out of Wikipedia some statistics on the world’s biggest companies, figuring that a reasonable comparison would be the amount of money made per employee. The data is likely […]

Maemo Summit 2009, Amsterdam – a bit of an open-source eye-opener

Last month, Tager Communications (a customer) took me out to the Nokia-sponsored Maemo Summit in Amsterdam to help figure out whether Maemo could play a part in the national message Nokia’s marketing division puts out about its new N9xx series. The most striking thing about being a visitor at the summit was how large the […]

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