Gary Gale

Posts tagged as "mobile"

Geolocating Yourself? In Europe, You're Not Alone

Exposure 2010, the recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

Pushpins in a map over France and Italy

In the UK, France, Spain and Poland, geolocation services occupy the 3rd, 2nd, 1st and 2nd slots respectively for most used mobile services. While the report only breaks geolocation down into two categories, streetmap/GPS and social networks, it's not difficult to see how the perception that location is finally going mainstream is worth some merit.

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Flight Safe Mode

As part of the security and safety announcement that gets made each time you get onto a plane these days, there's invariably a bit which goes something like this ... "all electrical equipment should be switched off during taxiing, take off and landing and all devices with a flight safe mode should have this enabled now".

This makes sense; in the case of an emergency, the airline wants you concentrating on the emergency, not your laptop or your phone. It may also be the case that the phone may in some way interfere with the flight systems. Opinion on this is divided but the former seems a more realistic option than the latter.

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Roughly Halfway Between England And France

As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don't go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto this piece of land, which looks identical to the one you're currently standing on but because of a line drawn on a map its ... different.

While lots of the animal kingdom are equally territorial, no one species has managed to invent a whole series of rules and regulations and to employe an entire bureaucracy to ensure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented and patrolled.

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Reaching The Limits Of Unlimited

Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it's an adjective and, if you'll pardon the condescension, it means the following:

  1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined
  2. boundless; infinite; vast
  3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional

Except in the world of mobile data or mobile broadband, where unlimited means, in a vaguely disturbing twisted, inverted, doublespeak sort of way, the exact opposite.

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Deliciousness: ringing phones, suicide linux, Flickr plugins, editing, zoomable maps and upsidedownness

Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

  • Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
  • Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
  • The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
  • Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
  • Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
  • We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
  • What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
  • Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
  • ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos
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O2 in Positive Customer Service Shock?

O2, the UK Telefonica brand and soon-to-be-loosing-the-iPhone-exclusivity-to-just-about-anyone mobile operator, have a reputation which is, to be honest, just a little bit crap. Their coverage in the rural wilds of Central London, especially around Soho and Covent Garden, seems to be scaled for a single user and a web searchfor "o2 customer service problems" throws up such gems as "O2 customer service consists of PAY UP OR ELSE" and "O2's customer service has to be the poorest I have ever come across".

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Paperless Boarding Passes

Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I'd checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM's online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I've yet to see it being used and there's no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

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