Let’s get #Nottingham trending!

Every so often someone has a small idea that balloons out of all recognition, often it is social media that is the driving force – think Rage against the machine. Nottingham could be the next big one….

It's a great place!

Within the last few days a plan has been hatched to try and publicise just what a great city Nottingham is. The generally held view by residents of Nottingham is that we get a pretty raw deal from the national press. I have commented upon this previously and although the negative comments made in the press are reducing we are sadly still best known for gun crime (which isn’t an issue) rather than the great things about the city. In other words the damage has been done and needs correcting.

So when Tony Bates @babblingbates suggested that today should be ‘get #Nottingham trending day’ I am sure he didn’t expect it to snowball like it has. It was picked up by all of the frustrated local businesses and individuals who want to ‘re-educate’ the UK about all that is good about Nottingham – this included the BBC, City Council and Nottingham Post. Tony has also appeared on Radio Nottingham to promote it and with the current Mayoral debate raging in the city the timing could not be better!

So now is the time to tell the rest of the UK and World what’s great about Nottingham;

Here are a few ideas of things related to Nottingham – Paul Smith, Boots, Robin Hood, The MRI scanner, Two top Universities, Nottingham Contemporary, it’s Batmans home - I could go on…

So now it is down to everyone else to add the hash tag #Nottingham, say something good about the city and get Nottingham trending today!

 

Why Microsoft “don’t get it “

For a while I have been ‘coming over from the dark side’ – that is to say I have been embracing the world of Apple. To some that classes me as a geek, historically Apple products were the preserve of the ‘Guardian reader’ set, not a bad thing in any way, but a stereotype that probably didn’t help their marketing! This puts me in the minority, but if I am honest I don’t care, as I find the Apple way so much less stressful.

With the massive growth of the iPod, iPad and iPhone, Apple are now a major player in the hardware market (for example they have almost 80% of the tablet market). Historically they have been weak in the world of software – and by weak I mean they did not have the business market particularly catered for – that was the province of Microsoft – and still is. But for how long?

Computing in the business and home market is going mobile, we are all getting smartphones, and the tablet is making desktop computing far less of a necessity. Our PC at home is used rarely now, either iPad or Mac has taken over. Consequently we are all keen to have our data available where ever we are – cloud computing by any other name. And who is doing this best and appears to have a game plan going forwards?

In my view it’s Apple and not Microsoft. I have started using Apples iCloud with its Numbers and Pages packages – all my documents are automatically available on all my devices (including my PC). The program’s are nothing like as ‘belt and braces’ as Word or Excel, but who uses anything like the full potential of those packages – they are just too complicated! Also on an iPad the Numbers spreadsheet is way better than anything Microsoft or any third-party converter can offer.

Apples iCloud is in its infancy, MobileMe was not a success, but the mobile OS has developed and I think we will see great things from Apple over the next few years in mobile data sharing and working – they never get things wrong more than once!

And what about Microsoft? Windows 8 is just about to appear and from what I have heard it is just Windows 7 with a weird front end. Their Office package has a web version, but it is not catching on (probably due to being too complex). Microsoft may be about to start to see the end of their dominance – a good thing?

 

4G Nottingham?

Not a good look - but you get the idea.....

We could become one of the first UK cities to get  super-fast 4G mobile broadband if Nottingham City Councils bid  for a share of the Government’s £100 million Urban Broadband Fund – which aims to bring world-leading super-fast broadband and wi-fi to ten of the UK’s cities – is successful.

4G – or fourth generation – is a more advanced version of 3G, the wireless internet that mobiles, laptops and tablet devices use. It is faster and means people will be able to access high-quality video and audio on the move – something that is becoming more and more of our everyday lives.

Only cities with more than 150,000 homes were allowed to apply for a share of the fund and from the shortlist Nottingham faces competition from Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester and Sheffield.

The UK’s four capitals – Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London – are guaranteed to be awarded funding as part of the scheme.

We have to wait until Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget speech later this month to see if the bid has been approved, but there is some additional potential for success – the high-speed data cabling could be laid along tram tracks while the works for line two of the tram are built over the next two years – saving money on the infrastructure costs.

How amazing would it be for Nottingham to be one of the country’s first 4G cities? Not only would existing businesses benefit from increased efficiency and improved connectivity, the city would also be in a much stronger position to respond to the rapidly emerging and anticipated future requirement of businesses.

Time to keep your fingers crossed and hope that the A453 announcement last year wasn’t a ‘flash in the pan’ for Nottingham.

 

Amazing maps of Twitter and Flickr activity

Once in a while you come across something that helps highlight a part of life that is perhaps more extensive than we think. This map shows how extensive mobile uploading is nowadays.

The map created by Eric Fischer combines data from the photo-sharing website Flickr and the micro-blogging network Twitter. The orange dots represent pictures uploaded to Flickr, while the blue dots are tweets, and the white dots represent locations that have been both tweeted and uploaded to Flickr.

City and tourist locations show up most – particularly with Flickr uploads

You can see from the map that the UK appears to be a ‘hot spot’ for Twitter and Flickr use, you can also see Paris clearly picked out in northern France. So simple but amazing!

 

Can cloud computing help reduce global warming?

There is a steady move towards cloud computing, both Apple and Microsoft are nudging their users towards it in different ways;

Apple via iCloud which is in its infancy, but has some potential. This however is currently based around machine based apps for word processing and similar, and only carries data.

Microsoft on the other hand is moving towards cloud based application use – Word, Excel etc accessed directly from their servers so that software is not PC based. This is perhaps more related to them trying to control pirated software than for our benifit though!

Is there a ‘green’ side to cloud computing though?

A study carried out late last year that focussed on large IT companies in France and the UK found that they could achieve large cost savings and carbon reductions by 2020 if they migrated their data storage operations to the cloud. The suggestion was that they could reduce their carbon emissions by up to 50%!

The study follows a recent forecast that use of cloud services could triple in the next two years, a fact that has  been backed up by a number of blue chip companies indicating that they intend to move to cloud solutions far quicker than many had thought. Obviously cost saving is the main aim – but a drop in carbon emissions has to be a positive side effect.

Cloud computing allows companies to reduce costs by buying less hardware and using servers located elsewhere to store, manage and process data. The report suggests that by 2020, large UK companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion and carbon reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles – figures not to be sniffed at.

And if your server farm is in a country that has lower emission electricity such as France, (where nuclear plants generate the bulk of electricity), that figure can be much lower.

So as we place more and more data in the cloud we can actually reduce our carbon footprint!

 

This is a brilliant explanation of social media…

This is just brilliant, often the best explanations are the simplest and this hits the nail firmly on the head – and I particularly like the reference to Google+!

 

Mobile phone users disturbing your meal?

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Remind me later

This is a great idea – which appears to have come from the USA – to try to control people’s use of their mobile phones when they are out with other people. I am sure we have all suffered the friend or colleague who answers their phone during a meal. Well this is a great way to temper their enthusiasm for picking up calls (or texts or emails).

feeling stressed just seeing a phone face down?

It is being called ”The Phone Stack” and the game tries to curb cell phone interruptions when dining out with friends. After everyone orders, they place their phones in the center of the table, face down (that bit is important). They may even stack the gadgets, as the name suggests. Even as the phones buzz and ring throughout the meal, no one is allowed to pick up their device. If someone is unable to resist his smartphone’s siren’s song, he or she is responsible for picking up the bill for the entire meal – brilliant!

The creator of the game (a 20 year old from California) says that her intention is to encourage people to get off their phones, although she also recommends not being so hard on people about the rules;

“The basic premise is to just get people open to the idea of staying active and attentive to one another. It’s really more of a fun concept in this new age high-tech life of ours. Conversation is the spice of life.”

Well said!

The only problem I can see is that the biggest offender in our family is not currently earning – she is a student – so would not be able to pay, she would expect me to!

 

Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review

I am not a huge fan of Google – any company that has such a significant hold over us all can’t be healthy. However as a company with so much data and access to it they are able to put together a fairly impressive review of the year.

This is a typically ‘flashy’ multimedia tour of the year and is well worth a view.

The review can be seen here – enjoy.

 

Flipboard – the way forward?

one of the 'home' pages

I am a self-confessed ‘geek’ – I love the ability to access things on the road and particularly love social media and the available news and articles via RSS feeds and the like. As such I am always on the look out for some form of aggregator to pull together a number of my ‘feeds’ into one place.

To date this has proved difficult and I have had to use separate apps for things like Twitter (Tweetbot which is great), Facebook (their own app) and news feeds (Byline – another great app), they all work fine but I have now found Flipboard which brings them all together in a very clever and ‘pretty’ manner. This youtube clip explains it really well.

an example of a tweet

I have not switched totally yet, but it all looks pretty promising so far. It is well worth a look, as the way you flip pages is just amazing. The presentation is also rather cool – it is more like a magazine style with pictures. That makes it sound a bit ‘simple’ but as you can see from the attached pictures it makes for a much richer and interesting experience. I for one am sold on it and hope that it develops as time goes by to include even more services – like LinkedIn for example.

news story - tap to read

I am aware that Google have just launched their take on this in the USA (why only there?) and it’s called Google Currents and it would I am sure pull down my Google Reader feeds really well (i currently use Byline). I also assume it would show them in more of a ‘magazine’ view (like Flipboard). However, my big reservation here is that it will be made to link to Google+ and not Facebook – and I really dislike Google+ so this will probably stop me trialing it when (or if) it finally becomes available in Europe.

Flipboard is well worth a look (and its free) – if nothing else it shows how user-friendly and visually exciting apps can be! This has to be the future!

 

Sadly predictable!

There is a bit of a backlash against the press at the moment with the Leveson enquiry looking into the ‘underhand ways’ in which most of our papers end up with their news stories. I say most – currently the only one properly ‘caught out’ is the News of the World, but time will tell if (probably when) the others fall as well.

But can the blame be totally placed at the feet of the journalists? I am not suggesting for a minute that they should be absolved of all their sins – what they have done is unforgivable, but society plays its part as well in this.

The recent confirmation of the most searched items on Bing and Yahoo unfortunately support the theory that we have an unhealthy interest in other people’s lives – especially if they are famous.

On Bing;

1. Justin Bieber was the most searched-for celebrity of 2011.
2. Kim Kardashian came second
3. Jennifer Aniston was third
4. Lindsay Lohan fourth
5. and Jennifer Lopez fifth.

Bieber was the only male artist in the top 10.

The Royal Wedding, the release of the final Harry Potter film and Beyonce’s pregnancy were among the most searched celebrity events of 2011.

Maria Sharapova, Tiger Woods and Serena Williams were the sports stars with the highest number of online searches.

AOL (which possibly is used by the US more) has also announced its own web searches list, which was topped by Charlie Sheen.

Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse also featured in AOL’s top 10.

Katie Price was the UK’s most searched-for celebrity of the year on Yahoo!, beating last year’s winner Cheryl Cole, although web searches for Cole remained high in 2011 after the singer was dropped from the judging panel on The X Factor USA.

They were joined in Yahoo’s top five by Kate and Pippa Middleton and former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas.

So a totally ‘star’ based set of searches! This could depress one, however the biggest search item of the year does perhaps give us some hope that news and current affairs at least gets a look in – what was it?

It was FTSE, as the global financial crisis continued to dominate headlines in 2011.