Daily Archive for March 29th, 2006

France’s deregulation of the telecommunication market : a model ?

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News. 0 Comments

I must say when I came across the Wall Street Journal’s article my first reaction was, well yes we do get a good offer for Internet access over here in France. When my sister went to England recently I was looking at the prices for her and I was pretty astonished. I mean there were a few cheap offers but they were often accompanied with small print that indicated that you had a 5 Gig bandwidth limit for example and/or a 128K connection and that was it. No Wifi included and I can remember one offer saying and if you want to share the line it will cost you more.

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Women in Europe may be spending more time online than men in 2007

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News and Trend. 0 Comments

An article at emarketer presents the findings of a recent study that illustrates how the time women in Europe spend online has increased faster over the last three years than for men. This data may be the indication of an ongoing trend that would in effect lead to a shift where women will be spending more time on line than men…

Read the article on emarketer

The article is a very interesting read and also discusses how women use the internet differently that has in turn brought a high increase in the sophistication of medium and technology used by women.

Complaining out loud at the theatre !!?

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in Personal, Theatre and Unusual. 1 Comment

I’ve just got back from a night at the theatre (I was doing the lights and sound). Two plays, one called “Three Sleepless Nights” by Caryl Churchill followed by “Mountain Language” by Harold Pinter. In the first play by Caryl Churchill there is a scene where a woman lying in bed and in despair cuts her wrist(s). On scene I bring the main lights down and shine a spot light on the sheet that has (fake) red blood that can be seen.

I must explain, this is in France, but tonight an older lady started shouting out saying that with all that was going on (i.e. the unrest and strikes I suppose) having this type of thing on display was disgraceful and she wanted her money back!!! She carried on about it for several minutes stopping and starting again with people from the audience asking her to leave / be quiet etc.

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As if being lonely wasn’t bad enough, a study says it is bad for the heart

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News and Trend. 0 Comments

A recent study by John Cacioppo from Chicago University illustrates that loneliness can increase “the blood pressure of those nearing retirement age to the same degree as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle”.
The study explained on the New Scientist web site (and nowhere to be found on the Journal of Psychology and Aging web site at this moment!) expands on a previous study and collected data. It indicates that social connections are an important element of the lonely factor and perceived and real social connections are sometimes misleading as are people perceived as outgoing and how isolated they sometimes feel…

Burn Me Again (pun intended)

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News and Tech. 0 Comments

I always refer to it as the MP3 fiasco, as far as the music industry is concerned. But unlike when I was a kid, when I burnt myself, and decided I didn’t like it and made sure I avoided the experience in the future, the music industry seems to like it ?!
To top it all they rely on and enforce protection systems that can a) backfire in catastrophic proportions and b) are recognized as being flawed.
If it wasn’t for the fact that we, the users, have to navigate these weird and wonderful traps laid down for us by the music industry it would be quite funny
As usual I like referring to an old BBC article that states that a majority of people that download music actually buy a lot of CDs. (Hey the BBC site is good they don’t just change all the links when they redo the site, can’t remember when they did that last though).

Travelling like Trump : you can !

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in Design, Marketing and Travel. 0 Comments

Having just launched a web site in French about travel (mainly writing articles about it) I was interested to hear about Donald Trump having just launched a travel web site. The fact that Donald has fair amount of money to spend on this type of venture had my expectations high. Well the design is pretty slick but not that original and integration with service providers throughout the site is not really done in what I’d call great harmony but hey ! Looking through at for example hotels and choosing Paris there a two addresses The ‘Four Seasons Hotel George V’ and the ‘The Victoria Palace Hotel’. Funnily enough I attended a conference at the latter and can tell you it looks just as stunning as the photos show it to be. After having looked at this the slogan for the site hit home ‘Travel Trump Style’ which you don’t see straight away if you’re not careful since it is an animated picture in the top left corner. Well at least they didn’t do it with Flash, the easy solution that too many sites opt for and is just ridiculous sometimes when this effect is required…

Take a look at the site for yourself

What if Word was available on the web : Writely

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News and Tech. 0 Comments

What if you accessed the web to create, edit and share your documents, Well Writely had the same idea and Google has just acquired them to further illustrate the fact that it’s a sound concept :
Take a look at Writely while waiting for them to properly integrate Google

Writely

Fiction becomes Fact : choose your flavour on the bottle

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in Tech. 0 Comments

Ipifini, Inc. has created a bottle where you choose what flavour the drink will have by selecting the appropriate button on the package. The packaging product found it’s source in the science fiction writer Jeff Noon’s 1997 book Solace : “I love the idea of the soft drink that can be turned into any kind of flavour you want. Why doesn’t somebody make this happen?”

A journey down memory lane with Apple (30 years old)

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in Tech. 0 Comments

Wired has published a nice little article that has images and a slideshow available to see the different images of what Apple’s Operating System and other software has looked like over the years :

Photo Gallery: Apple Turns 30

Enjoy !

Wikipedia versus Britannica : an example of why Web2.0 does need hierarchy and strcuture

Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 in News and Trend. 0 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the ‘Web 2.0′, and how getting people to participate and create, is the future. Wikipedia is often cited as an example. The recent study that has flared up in the magazine Nature’s face is interesting in this matter. It is for me an indication that saying everything should be open as if trying to find some parallel with the words Open Source is just not feasible as a model.
Letting anybody post anything, anywhere and expecting people to respect one another and be accurate in all they say is pretty utopian. The will to get rid of all structure and process that is inherent to professional structures in order to get things done faster sounds nice but is just far too simplistic in the real (and virtual) world.

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