tv is in trouble
“Ipsos MediaCT found that even though TV is still the dominant method of video consumption among those who have streamed a video online, that dominance is slipping. TV was down to 70% of video watching time from 75% last year, while “personal computer” jumped from 11% in 2007 to 19% this year. That was even more pronounced among teens. In the 12-17 age group, PC watching was 24%, while TV was down to 55% of screen time.”
where’s waldo? what’s he buying?
I mentioned previously how researchers have tracked human movement by tracking mobile phones and discovered (surprise, surprise) that most people are creatures of habit, rarely deviating from their home neighborhood or usual commute route. Well it’s not just social researchers who are interested in this sort of thing. According to this article in the London Times shopping complex operators are now starting to use phone signals to track just how long shoppers spend in particular stores.
thanks for the memory
This recent “Coding Horror” item compares read write performance for HDD to USB flash drives, see here. I haven’t seen real number there for some time.
“Modern 2.5″ hard drive performance looks something like this:
HDD Sequential Read 55 MB/sec
HDD Sequential Write 55 MB/sec”
They compared to three recent model 32 GB USB Flash drives.
“Sequential Read Seqential Write
22 MB/sec 10 MB/sec
30 MB/sec 22 MB/sec
31 MB/sec 17 MB/sec”
Also of interest is ‘StorageReview’ . Maybe one to bookmark for your next storage purchase decision.
know when to shush
Just as the technology to allow mobile calls from onboard airliners is starting to roll out, Qatar Airlines has decided to ban it.
Why?
Their customers are telling them that they don’t want the bother of putting up with fellow passengers conversing whilst air.
It looks like too many people forget the first of “the ten commandments of mobile phone etiquette”.
“1. Thou shalt not subject defenseless others to cell phone conversations. When people cannot escape the banality of your conversation, such as on the bus, in a cab, on a grounded airplane, or at the dinner table, you should spare them. People around you should have the option of not listening. If they don’t, you shouldn’t be babbling”
For the other nine see here .
what no stimulus?
We’ve all at some time or other ’solved problems’ by “sleeping on them.” Anyhow I recently came across some blog entries discussing this whole subconcious problem solving thing. (See items here and here ).
Well what’s new is that there now seems to be some recent psychological study of just how “idle minds” work on problems. As the psychologist researcher says they are not day dreaming, just engaged in “stimulus independent thought”
“Stimulus independent thought” (SIT …?). Hmmmm. This reminds me of an old joke. “Sometimes I just sits and thinks, sometimes I just SITs”.
go go google maps on the go
Google Maps Mobile is a great new and useful mobile web innovation, and it’s great news for Australians, at least if you happen to live in Perth, Western Australia . Let’s hope public transport authorities in other parts of the country start to revamp their current web offerings (see, for example, Melbourne’s Metway link - and Sydney’s Transport infoline ) to leverage off GMM.
fring’s blonde (2.0) moment
fring and the new fringAPI got some recent attention on digg (see here). The post being digged was from Social Marketing Strategist & Consultant Ayelet Noff who blogs at Blonde 2.0 . Ayelet’s post on the fring, the fringAPI and her interviews with the fring team are worth checking out.
Ayelett’s blog is worth exploring, and not just for the great discussion of fring, but for her comments and links on the world of social media. This is a growing field but, it would seem to me, not really a ‘new’ idea. Most forms of media, say newspapers, and most forms of marketing, have always had a ‘community building’ and ’social’ element. Of course the web 2.0 world has energised and accelerated the whole process, and shifted the centre of gravity somewhat from the ’supplier’ to the customers, users and ‘community’.
mobile phones - a hundred years in the making
A Kentucky farmer with the seemingly appropriate name of Nathan Stubblefield just might make the history books as the ‘father of mobile telephony.’ The London ‘Telegraph’ tells some of story of Stubblefield’s pioneering work a century ago.
There’s more about Stubblefield’s contribution to our world, see here.
hAPIness is a warm fringAPI
Here’s the latest news across the fringdom, fring has just released fringAPI will free developers to unleash their creativity and launch new “fringAdd-ons”.
One of the engines of creativity behind the “Web 2.0″ world is the API . To read more on how APIs free developers to create new web infrastructure, see the article here. Now fring is freeing up the power and freedom of APIs too. You can read more at the fring main blog here.
Hang on to your hats fringsters, this is going to be a fun trip for all of us!
