dayjob

An unexpectedly scary experience. I had to give a presentation at Telco 2.0’s conference this week, the first time I’ve done this, and the first time I did it at all since OpenTech 2008 (audio, slides). This, quite unexpectedly, flipped me into hellish stage fright, which I had always assumed to be basically a load…

Read More Scared.

What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…

Read More The politics of call centres, part one

The Libyan rebels are making progress, as well as robots. Some of them are reported to be within 40 miles of Tripoli, those being the ones who the French have been secretly arming, including with a number of light tanks. Now that’s what I call protecting civilians. They are also about to take over the…

Read More If you’re out of luck and out of work, we could send you to the western mountains of Libya

So I had the opportunity to take part in an Augmented Reality standardisation meeting on the fringe of this year’s 3GSM Mobile World Congress. First of all, it was the year the heavens opened (someone on twitter said it was as if the show had turned into Glastonbury) and I got drenched and my shoes…

Read More i haz bin in yr AR standardz, facilitatin yr interop. kthx!

OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when…

Read More optimise your social isolation more efficiently

In which the Database nearly got me. So I went to 3GSM (sorry, sorry, Mobile World Congress). Now, these things are usually fairly good previews of the ID-card future – constant RFID-tag badging, lists everyone in the world is either on or they aren’t, security theatre aplenty. On this occasion, when I visited the registration…

Read More a terrible experience with extremely dangerous bugs