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17th February 2012:
SEO rant!

Time for a rant against a pet hate - shysters who want to charge ridiculous sums for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services. Getting the engines to recognise your site is not rocket science, although you clearly need to understand how they work, and how a website is put together.

The big search players will tell you how to make your site popular with them. Both Google and Bing have Webmaster Tools, extensive suites of diagnostic and configuration components, how-to guides, crawl and error statistics packages. Don't believe all that spam (why is it so frequently SEO companies?) or cold-calling. A site's visibility can be raised organically just by following Google's and Bing's rules - which are remarkably similar.

If you really want to spend money to get a higher-than-average profile, you can buy SEM (Search Engine Marketing) from the search companies themselves. Put together advertising campaigns with Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter.

7th December 2011:
Ted Hoff saved his own life

Only just found another great story in the BBC Technology pages from earlier this year. Ted Hoff is credited alongside his colleagues at Intel with inventing the first microprocessor, the four-bit 4004, released in 1971. It was originally designed to drive a range of calculators for Busicom, a Japanese electronics maker. He saved his own life? Now 73, he has inside him a microprocessor which controls his pacemaker and hence his heart. Ted appreciates the sense of coming full circle. "It's a nice feeling," he says. Read the whole article here.

17th November 2011:
Smartphones

iPass Inc. today published its quarterly Mobile Workforce Report which found that iPhone has unseated BlackBerry as the top smartphone among mobile employees with 45% market share. The survey was conducted between September 27 and October 26, 2011, and represented employees across multiple age groups and geographies. 49% of respondents were from North America, 32% from Europe, and 12% from the Asia/Pacific region. Get the report here.

6th October 2011:
RIP Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has gone. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. For the rest of us, it's the loss of a great innovator who shaped our landscape over the last 30 years. We remember with fondness our first Macintosh back in the eighties. Such a feel to its case, such a clean interface, the real plug-and-play. Jobs always had an instinct for the market. He backed the graphical user interface. He backed music players. He backed photos on a 'phone. So from the lows of the mid-nineties, today, with a market value estimated at $351bn (Ł227bn), Apple is the world's most valuable technology company. But it's not just money that defines his and Apple's success. It's also a matter of style and creativity. Not for nothing is an Apple product the luvvie's (check out Stephen Fry earlier this year) device of choice.

Listen to the words of his Stanford Commencement speech in 2005: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

19th September 2011:
iPad at Fulham FC

The steady march of the iPad continues. Didn't we see an iPad 2 in the hands of the lovely Lara Pulver, playing Erin Watts, Chief of Section D, in Sunday's episode of "Spooks"? Well, now we hear the the football community is using them for security. Check out this article in The Register. "Fulham Football Club has rolled out a new private cloud-based security system that enables its staff to remotely monitor crowd activity using devices such as Apple's iPad tablet, allowing it to cut its server footprint down from 36 to six. The new private cloud technology infrastructure links Fulham's Craven Cottage stadium and its Motspur Park training ground. Previously the club used a network of six VHS recorders and 27 cameras to keep an eye on fans but this stand-alone storage infrastructure system was costly and difficult to manage and maintain, according to Nicolas Pendlebury, Fulham's head of IT, as tapes needed to be manually scanned and cameras checked before each match."

16th August 2011:
Big anniversaries - the IBM PC and the WWW

The last fortnight has seen two big milestones in the history of our technology, celebrating two inventions that have changed our world.

The original IBM PC, the personal computer that helped launch an industry, made its debut at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on 12 August 1981. Yes, that's 30 years. Nobody, not even IBM, had any idea how pervasive it would become as a standard. The key to its success lay in an open architecture which allowed many others to enter the hardware market, the so-called "clone" manufacturers. At the same time, software developers could write to the standard and a whole eco-system of applications grew. Today, analysts are predicting the decline of the PC. Even one of its original creators, Mark Dean, still working for IBM, says that his primary computer is now a tablet. See a silicon.com article with Mark's comments here.

On 6th August 1991 - yes, that's 20 years - Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee published the first ever website, resulting from development after his original proposal at Cern in 1989. We don't need to say much about the effect the web has had on our private and business lives. It's interesting that Tim, and Vinton Cerf with TCP/IP, have not become fabulously rich on the back of their inventions, merely legends in their chosen field. Others have made the big money. For more pictures from Computer Weekly click here.

August 3rd 2011:
Microsoft goes big on "The Cloud"

We've just finished reviewing the big Microsoft partner conference of last month. Plenty of commitment to the cloud. As CEO Steve Ballmer said in his keynote speech, they're "all-in", very focussed. Lots of talk about Office 365. Lots of jargon to digest: "on-premise" computing, the "private cloud", the "public cloud". But do they really mean it, or is it lip-service? Hedging their bets? Probably. What does it all mean to Joe Public? One thing is for certain, it places huge emphasis on the network. Great Internet connections are not a nice-to-have in the cloud. Is it the end of the desktop and related local applications? Not yet. Mind you, it does feel like the computer world is coming full circle. The PC was a liberation from the mainframe men in white coats in distant data centres. It brought you control of your own computing power. Is that independence now going back out? Cloud could be the right term for it. Anyway, it's worth taking a look. Steve Ballmer's keynote is probably the place to start. Click here.

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