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Archive for: January, 2008

Peter Roberts - UCL - London | 31/01/2008 | 3768 views

People are bored with social networking sites - here's proof

Have a look at Creative Capital for some figures on a drop-off in both visitor numbers and more crucially the time spent on social networking sites in the U.S.MySpace showed a drop in engagement time of almost a quarter. So are people spending less time on these sites because the sites have improved and they are getting more done, more quickly - or...

Peter Roberts - UCL - London | 30/01/2008 | 7932 views | 3 comments

iPhone O2 tariff price drop shock

O2 have cut the monthly price for iPhone users - which as of yesterday included me - hurrah. I had been looking to replace my iPod and dodgy phone - and ideally wanted something that did proper web browsing and actually made calls with some degree of success. Google maps on the iPhone is astonishing. Press a button and it works out where you are. A...

Peter Roberts - UCL - London | 25/01/2008 | 2459 views

ROI on web site usability still pretty high - Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen's site is always an interesting read as usability is one of my big obsessions.It sounds obvious stuff really - if your site loads quickly and is easy to use - folk will not click away elsewhere, yet so many sites get this wrong. Horribly so. I have a huge problem with some blogging sites in this regard. And don't get me starte...

Peter Roberts - UCL - London | 18/01/2008 | 1162 views

One laptop per child - the kit reviewed

My colleague Navjeet has taken an interest in the OLPC project which recently had Intel pull out. The Register today have a hands on review of the machine itself - the OLPC XO - and it looks pretty funky.

Peter Roberts - UCL - London | 17/01/2008 | 1618 views

Sun buys MySQL for 1 billion dollars

Here's an M&A story that caught my eye yesterday. Sun buys MySQL - the world's most popular open source database for a billion dollars. I'd have just downloaded it for free but there you go. I'll get me coat. LAMP - or Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl is oft quoted as THE combo to go for a robust (and cheap) web site - powering...