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A digital Sunday evening…

September 11, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

It’s Sunday night and for various reasons I’ve been offline for about 48 hours and I’m pretty tired. So what am I doing?

The Xbox is currently playing Forza Motorsport 3 for itself as the AI goes through the tedium of endless races to get the final game achievement and clear the way for Forza Motorsport 4 – important considering the amount of coverage I’ll be doing on OnlineRaceDriver.
My phone is currently uploading 100+ images from today to Flickr after our trip to Woburn Safari Park, which I’ll then need to group edit and tag.
And I’m on the laptop, having cleared out any notification emails, scanned and marked as read any RSS items, and started sorting out what I need to finish this week for both client sites and my own. Assuming that’s ever finished, hopefully I’ll catch up with the F1 race from earlier with iPlayer.

What struck me is that I don’t think the fact I have 3 internet devices all chuntering away on a ‘relaxing’ Sunday night is at all strange. And while I might be slightly unusual in running my own online-based businesses and spending most of my leisure time online, I suspect we’re still nowhere near the peak demand in bandwith for uploading and curating personal content online. What was once the preserve of the geeks and over-sharers is not only increasingly normal for everyone, but faster internet access, mobile connectivity and general access throughout less-developed countries means we’re still figuring out what we can do, and crucially, how to do it more easily.

Checking out my stats on Flickr, it’s blindingly obvious that most of my uploads have all come since I started using a smartphone, which allows quick uploading to Flickr. Without that, everything would still be on my memory card or hard drive.

And it was only recently that I finally got around to using the group edit functions, and could suddenly make a lot more photos public and accessible with at least some attempt at titles and tags (My default upload is always private for various reasons).

And that’s adding up to 10′s of thousands of views on Flickr alone.

It made me think that so much of the web is still so difficult, and that we’re still miles away from the potential in universal easy access. And that will also enable us to more easily spend time offline or better utilise mobile connectivity. It’s time to make things easier for everyone…

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Filed Under: Digital Culture, technology Tagged With: dan thornton, digital tools, ease of access, ease of use, flickr, internet, uploading

Plane crazy

August 30, 2011 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

I seem to split my time between making predictions about future business and technology, and looking back at the past. Maybe it’s my age or fatherhood, but I seem to be finding links between the two far more readily, especially when my son is involved, although this time it’s more about just enjoying the fantastic machinery on show at Imperial War Museum Duxford.

Spitfire at Duxford, with Concorde in the background

It really is a cool place to visit – 200 planes, 50 tanks, and enough to keep a young child entertained while his dad admired everything from fighter planes to commercial airliners and the occasional Spitfire. Plus, it’s the only time I’ve ever been buzzed by a jet fighter in true Top Gun style whilst sitting and eating an ice cream.

They’ve got pretty much everything from vintage biplanes to the Eurofighter, SR-71 BlackBird and of course, Concorde. And I have to admit, not being privy to the joy of travelling across the Atlantic in under 3 hours, that I was a bit surprised it wasn’t a little more glamourous.

The seating in the Concorde at Duxford (Admittedly it was used for test flights)

But besides the wonder of seeing all these amazing machines up close, whether it’s the SR-71 BlackBird I had as a poster on my wall, or the Russian T-34 tank, I did wonder about the fact that it appears aviation seemed to stop around the time computers and the internet began to exist in the 60′s and 70′s.
I don’t mean that we don’t all cram into budget class on a 747 for our holidays, but all of the amazingly futuristic designs seem to have been replaced by pure utility, much as we once had Cadillacs with huge fins and now have sensible hatchbacks. And I’m wondering why we aren’t seeing a return to amazing designs?

After all, there must be some way that the increase in virtual conferencing reducing business travel, and the increases in environmentally-friendly travel could give rise to transport that looks amazing whilst saving the planet? Not everyone who wants to prevent global environmental catastrophes wants to drive around in something that looks like a jelly mold or a box on wheels.

It’s that belief that everything has to be OR, rather than AND. The web has to destroy print, rather than both existing in a completely different way. And the internet and the environment demand that we end up travelling in dull tedium, as experienced by every commuter on a daily basis, rather than something cool and interesting.

Want me to increase my efforts to recycle and turn the heating down? Find me a way that I’ll be rewarded with something like this on my driveway in 10 years.

And while I’m talking about how great planes are – it’s not flying people hate. It’s the fact that airports are soulless, miserable places which increase boredom and anxiety, before the joy of passing through customs, and then the loss of control as unexplained noises accompany some stranger hurtling you into the air at 300+mph, whilst knowing you’re likely to be stuck circling round a destination in the middle of nowhere, waiting for your suitcase to appear alongside 20 identical examples, and then the fun of customs in a different culture.

On the plus side, Duxford is great, and I’m seriously thinking of their membership package just to get the tour of this rather famous plane:

The Sally B - Also known as The Mephis Belle

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Filed Under: technology Tagged With: air travel, concorde, duxford, functionality, glamour, internet, planes, technology

Find the best radio stations – online

October 19, 2009 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Finding the best radio station is obviously a subjective experience. Are you looking for a particular band or genre? Do you want somewhere with variety? And how on earth do you find the station that’s right for you as an individual without going through every stop on the dial and noting down what they play for a whole day or more?

CompareMyRadio.com is the newest project to launch from One Golden Square Labs (Disclosure: One Golden Square Labs is from the team behind Absolute Radio, where I’m Digital Marketing Manager)

And it’s an incredibly simple and effective way to find and compare radio stations (I can say that honestly as it wasn’t my idea, sadly). All you need to do is enter the name of your favourite artist, track or station, and you’ll be presented with which stations play the most of your favourite music, or which music your station plays the most.

It also gives you a guide to how many tracks a station plays over a set period of time, and how much variety there is.

And best of all, the results are completely down to you as an individual – so there can’t be any implied bias. In fact, picking three bands at random from my collection, Metallica, The Lemonheads, and The Charlatans, Absolute Radio wasn’t the top result for the three, although it was in the running every time.

As with the recent launch of a user-controlled radio station, Dabbl, it’s currently in Beta and there are plenty of plans for the future, so give it a go and share your feedback…

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Filed Under: radio Tagged With: best, comparemyradio, dabbl, favourite, find, internet, listen, one gold square labs, online, radio, search

When novelty becomes necessity

July 1, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

When technological advancements such as the printing press, telegraph or the car were invented, it took a while to get going. Even something as simple as sliced bread took a good few years before becoming widely adopted.

And yet the increasing pace of change means what seemed a novelty just a short time ago soon becomes expected.

The free wifi on National Express trains is one case in point.

When it was first introduced, it seemed like a minor miracle that I could now access the internet and get work done whilst travelling, for no extra charge, even in standard class.

But within a couple of years I’m amazed that other trains don’t have it, and I’m immensely frustrated and disappointed that the speed and reliability hasn’t improved. In fact it’s got much, much worse as more and more people are using laptops and netbooks on the train.

Mobile broadband is similar. It took a while for the mobile phone to become widely adopted, but now mobile internet access is becoming a standard and expected part of any new mobile device. And it’s data costs and anything less than 100% access that become the talking points, rather than the fact I can access the web from something in the palm of my hand.

And that frustration we feel is because we don’t just become accustomed to this access.

We come to rely on it.

For work, home, and everywhere in between.

Postscript:

Just remembered that apparently, 53% of British mobile phone users suffer ‘no mobile phobia’, or nomophobia, ‘with 48 per cent of women and 58 per cent of men questioned admitting to experiencing feelings of anxiety when they run out of battery or credit, lose their phone or have no network coverage.’ (HT Textually.org).

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