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Pay and display car parks are irritating. I never have change, and I resent having to overpay in order to guarantee I don’t get a ticket. A better option would be to register the car and use auto numberplate recognition (ANPR) to track entering and exiting the car park. Like the London congestion charge with it’s “�� arrangement.

In the UK, the first part of this is being addressed by allowing for parking to be paid for by phone. The two largest companies that provide this service to lo...

Now that (and if they haven’t, having your app store owned by someone who’s churned out isn’t going to help any), it looks certain that Windows Phone will claim the third slot in the platform market.

Well �� ish. In fact, Nokia will claim the third slot behind Samsung and Apple, because the smartphone market is defined by . Non-technologist consumers do not care about platforms.

But I digress, the point I’m trying to make...

In this “final thoughts�� video follow up to my ZDNet piece “The ‘Rule of Three�� explains the smartphone market perfectly��, I discuss how the economic truism of the “Rule of Three�� applies to the smartphone market.

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In this “final thoughts�� video follow up to my ZDNet piece “Developing for niche platforms is illogical (and dangerous)��, I discuss the idea that being a “big fish in a small pond�� isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The focus needs to be on the business, not the app.

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As technologists we have an expectation that email is something that needs a PC to really do it justice. Historically, email has always been on PCs �� although I remember as a kid my dad using a 3270 terminal to access email on a mainframe at his work.

At low-scale, email is helpful for receiving notifications from service providers (social networking services, e-commerce services, etc), and also receiving short-form messages and photos from friends and family. None of that requires a PC.

In rea...

Apple is a brand, and iPhone is a brand. People go out of their way to deliberately buy iPhones. When they don’t, they enter into a transaction where they end up with an Android phone.

I’ve put it that way deliberately �� people don’t seek out “Android�� in the market. (Technologists do, normal people don’t.)

Brands only work on smartphones when they are physically stamped onto the device. When we talk about the smartphone market as being “iOS, Android, and a third�� (the third now being Windows P...

On Monday I did a ZDNet piece called “��.

In this follow-up video, I discuss the piece in more detail, reiterate the idea that for the Windows 8 Project in Consumerland it needs to be divorced from enterprise considerations, and then get confused as to why I got a lot of feedback about BYOD.

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In nature, all kinds of weird relationships exist. One such type of relationship is called “�� �� one whereby two creatures associate with each other, one of them gets some benefit, and the other derives neither benefit nor harm.

I got to the definition thinking that Samsung’s relationship with Google might be like that of the . These little guys hang out with sharks and eat parasites and leftover food. For some reason, pilot fish rarely turn into the sharks�� dinner. You’d...

Yesterday I did a ZDNet piece called “��.

In this follow-up video, I discuss the piece in more detail, add some thoughts about consoles, and link it back to ubiquitous computing (ubicomp).

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This is the third in a series of seven posts �� one post for each chapter of my book

The “enterprise niche�� is the term that I use to describe how although the computing industry grew up based on investment by business, going forward into the post-PC era investment will primarily be done by normal people buying smartphones and tablets (with some relatively small-scale purchasing of PCs for domestic use) through retail channels.

The important thing for people who actually learn a...