Category Archives: culture, media & technology

What Would Children Miss The Most? Mobile 100%

culture, media & technology

Benedict Evans’ provocatively titled Mobile Is Eating the World presentation caught my eye the other night. In particular slide #30, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment.

Mobile, or more precisely smartphones and tablets, would apparently be missed the most among (UK) children aged 11 to 15 years. Mobile, more than TV, games console, PC, and “Other”, though it’s not entirely clear what Other would represent. Perhaps playing outdoors or some random non-screen-oriented activity.

I’m not at all surprised by this statistic. This evening I arrive home to find my 8-year old son glued to his iPad on yet another one of his ongoing and seemingly never-ending Clash Of Clans campaigns. This is homework procrastination at its finest, a game that easily sets the benchmark (at least in our household) for what’s been called a ‘sticky’ experience.
No other game even comes close —not Skylanders —not even Minecraft. It’s only a matter of time before Finland based Supercell (the makers of Clash of Clans) are snatched up by Microsoft or some other tech behemoth looking to further monetize the tablet-obsessed 8 to 15 year-old demographic.

Playing Clash Of Clans

Bewildering Spam

culture, media & technology, technology

bewildering email spam
I’ve been getting a string of bewildering messages infiltrating my email in-box recently. Yeah we all get this crap. It’s become a nauseating part of the morning routine. Wake up, eat breakfast, brew coffee, open email and waste a few minutes or so deleting dozens of bogus email messages.

Lately the senders oddly appear to be randomly generated Gmail accounts. No fabricated identities here just automated nonsense. What’s going on here? Has Gmail become a conduit for bottom-feeder spammers?
Let’s call them digital hucksters. Unscrupulous individuals looking to push useless wares on us or, worse, grab our personal information and exploit our bits and bytes for financial gain.

Yes the brilliant minds over at the Googleplex can devise cutting edge innovations like self-driving automobiles but can’t solve the seemingly rudimentary task of freeing us from the tyranny of junk information circulating the net each day.

As I write this post I see that I have no less than 647 spam messages awaiting moderation in the comments area of my blog. Akismet tells me that in the past 6-months 36,449 spam comments have been blocked and in the month of May alone apparently 6,733 spam comments have been effectively thwarted.
Oh hurray… …I’m overjoyed.

Just this week one of my clients emailed me with questions and concerns over the large number of spam comments their blog has been receiving in the past few weeks. I’m really at a loss to explain this recent rise in spam. It’s as though the Web is becoming this vast digital apparatus for circulating fake automated information of absolutely no real value other than wasting our time.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, is this the networked world you envisioned?

The Networked Society, On the Brink

culture, media & technology

On The Brink, part of Ericsson’s Networked Society series, primarily explores the future of connectivity and the changing dynamics set forth by our rapidly evolving digital economy.

We’ll live healthier longer lives as a result of nanotech sensors used in conjunction with embedded wireless devices that will constantly monitor and optimize our physiology by relaying data back to cloud based medical services.
We’ll engender a smarter more innovative culture and workforce because of widespread access to higher education and knowledge resources through wireless information networks

The barriers to running a successful business, building an audience, and reaching end consumers with products and services no longer exist because of the low cost of entry provided by networked tools and technologies.

These are some of the most encouraging ideas considered by the continued growth and development offered by our increasingly networked world.
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