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Twinloops blog

Jan's thoughts on tech


Facebook’s uninentional poignancySeptember 5

Sometimes Facebook (and other similar sites) are unintentionally poignant. Take this example:

Isn’t that just tragic? There are no quotation marks around that “friends” - it’s just there on its lonely own, as if Timothy really doesn’t have any friends. In reality, this Timothy just hasn’t convinced himself that the whole Facebook thing is worthwhile yet and so hasn’t translated his myriad real-life friends into Facebook “friends”. Still, if I were him I’d add just one contact just so it isn’t quite so pathetic.

My first MacSeptember 4

OK, so this wasn’t actually my Mac - I was visiting the office of one of my parents. But this was one of my earliest experiences with a Mac, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. I think I probably mostly used the Paint function, which appealed to my sensibilities at the time. I was also into BASIC programming for a while around the same time, creating short programs…

At any rate, it had been quite a while since I’d used a Mac since I purchased a little-used Mac Mini a couple of years ago and then a MacBook a few months ago…

An empty inbox prompts a sigh of contentmentSeptember 2

This is my inbox right now (actually, 2 minutes ago when I started writing this post - it’s since got an out of office reply from a colleague in it, but that’s easily solved).

It’s been quite some time since my Inbox was empty - I’ve been too swamped with other things to deal with a myriad of small items that’s come up and once it gets beyond a certain point I tend to let it go entirely as a lost cause until I have some clear time to deal with it all.

I actually gave an audible sigh of relief and my heart lifted for a moment when I finally returned to that pristine, empty Inbox. Who knows how long it will stay that way, but it’s a pleasure to look at for the moment.

Nice that we can have some simple pleasures in amongst the other stuff in life.

Oh dear, two emails in there already. Better stop blogging and get back to managing my inbox… Sigh…

Recent links on net neutralityAugust 21

I’ve been meaning to do another post on net neutrality based on a fair amount of recent activity on various blogs but haven’t had time. To cut down on the number of open tabs in my browser, I’m just going to dump the links here and let you read them yourselves:

I’m not convinced any of these companies has 100% the right approach but I’m glad we’re finally discussing it in a reasonable manner rather than simply posturing or suing one another about this…

Things I’m going to be writing aboutAugust 14

I attended the Ericsson North American analyst event yesterday and came back with lots of ideas for pieces to write over the next couple of months. One or two of them may end up being blog posts here but the rest will likely be content published for Ovum’s paying customers (I’ll try to share some snippets here regardless). Here is a list of most of them:

  • 5 things regulators can do to help telecoms to continue to grow in a sluggish economy. This was sparked by some comments from one of the speakers at the Ericsson event who talked about regulators screwing up markets - and it made me realise that much of Ovum’s regulatory content (which now sits within my practice) is pretty much after-the-fact commentary rather than prescriptive advice for regulators.
  • The impact of a billion new middle class consumers on the global telecoms market. The 1 billion number is the estimate of a number of (non-telecom) analysts about the additional members of the ‘middle class’ (whatever that means on a global scale) who will come out of China, India and other emerging markets in the next few years.
  • How real are economies of scale and scope in telecoms? We talk about this a lot as if it’s an obvious fact of life in telecoms, but I’m not sure much analysis has been done on how real the impact is compared with the price (specifically, acquisition and integration expenses and associated disruption) that is often paid to achieve them. Not yet sure how to m