Iphone

So I did it - I went and signed on the dotted line and come home with my very own iphone... after resisting the ipod touch and ipods of all varieties for so long (although I did buy one for my wife) I am now the proud owner of some apple hardware and a 3G phone to boot.

Up until recently I have been sold on the N96 as my next phone, with a great camera, GPS and all the rest of it, it sounded like the N95 (which I also coveted for some time).  However after reading a few reviews on Engadget I decided that the N96 was not really for me, the main attraction was the camera, and that was something I decided to I could live without in a phone.. well that many megapixels anyway.

The Iphone does have a camera, and a GPS and that lovely touch screen - and what seems like an endless supply of applications, some free and some not - applications that allow you to have fun with the GPS and camera and all the rest of it.  Another bonus that I had not counted on was the kids - they love it, with a screen they can touch - nae - are meant to touch and buttons, that actually look like the things they do... the camera especially - they are able to pick the thing up and take pictures, with minimal instruction (they are 3 and 5) not that I let them get too far with it :-) 

So now that I have it - would I make the same decision again? definitely - the full touch keyboard and large screen make it an excellent tool for social apps like twitter.friendfeed and facebook - and lets face it that where I spend 99% of my time these days.  I am betting it is only going to enhance my hyper-connectivity, which can only be a good thing right?

technology populism

I love this recent post from RWW - talking about the recent Gartner research report and emerging trends for CIO's - in particular the first point that is raised is something call technology populism; here is the excerpt from the post....

Technology Populism: Web 2.0 and social networking in the enterprise. Workers are provisioning their own tools, especially when IT can't provide. IT had best look towards integrating Enterprise 2.0 into their organization - if they don't, the end users will simply go find their own apps to use. The risks of ignoring this trend include compromised security, comprised privacy, and poor control of intellectual property. (We discussed this concept in more detail here).

........ and I now realise that this is essentially my attitude to CIO tools in my work area - if they are not available easily from internal IT why not just use the tools on the web.  I have never really had a name for it before, but once you are exposed to things like google doc's, google reader, delicious, twitter, yahoo pipes and the list goes on why would you even bother to try and recreate such things inside the firewall.  I just don't understand the reticence, well I do - everyone is worried about security etc, but for most things the security offered by web services is more then sufficient, and sometimes superior to what can be provided by internal ICT that there is no argument.

The other point I will make about this is that there is not widespread adoption of the web2.0 ethic about sharing everything with everyone - well not quite that free, but a lot more transparent then is currently the case inside govt firewalls...some of my colleagues call me a digital hippy, which I did not really understand until the free love reference was made clear to me, and in some ways that what web2.0 is about... in some ways.  Technology populist - I can live with that!