Outlook: Cloudy
It's Wimbledon fortnight, and living in south west London I'm watching out for the inevitable clouds and rain, something that made me think about the other cloud...I'm not really one to use cloud services.
500 words into the future
Unapologetically opinionated views on technology, in the office and out
Simon Bisson
Simon Bisson is a freelance technology journalist. He specialises in architecture and enterprise IT. He ran one of the UK's first national ISPs and moved to writing around the time of the collapse of the first dotcom boom. He still writes code.
Mary Branscombe
Mary Branscombe is a freelance tech journalist. Mary has been a technology writer for nearly two decades, covering everything from early versions of Windows and Office to the first smartphones, the arrival of the web and most things inbetween.
Latest Posts
The hidden roots of the web: fifty years of PLATO
Imagine a computer network when you can connect with thousands of other users, can play multiplayer games, chat online and share information across the world, explore complex documents that link between pages and between different elements of content – all on terminals with local memory and high resolution touch displays.Sound familiar?
IE9 and SVG (and what about Canvas?)
The SVG working group met at the beginning of June and decided to send the SVG 1.1 Second Edition proposal to the W3C, turning its attention to SVG 2.
TechEd. It's all about the Ed, not the Tech.
We’re currently in a hot and humid New Orleans with 11,000 IT pros and developers, at Microsoft’s TechEd North America event. It’s one of those events that helps you drill down into the deep and dark places that underpin Microsoft’s growing technology stack with the folk behind the tools and the services.
Is Windows Server competing with Windows 7?
SP1 for Windows 7 is further proof of what Microsoft has been saying - and the sales figures for Windows 7 have been confirming - all along. Windows 7 doesn't need the kind of service pack that XP and Vista needed.
A week of Android: grade - B
Exchange email sync is almost right on the HTC Evo I've been trying out since Google IO; almost is actually quite infuriating but still bad news for Windows Phone.I hadn't tried out Android 2.
What a flexible display looks like
To get screens to be as ubiquitous as paper, the price is going to have to drop as low as paper - and than means getting away from clean rooms and expensive glass-handling robots. HP, as a printer company, thinks that printing screens is the way to do it.
HP on WebOS slates, printed displays and Wi-Fi watches
What's a supposedly staid company like HP doing at Maker Faire? Fitting in perfectly.
VP8; some things that I wonder about
At Google IO, the Google team talked repeatedly about having done "a thorough legal analysis" into the VP8 video codec to make sure it doesn't infringe any patents . "We're very confident with the technology," product manager Mike Jazaeri told us; "that's why we're open sourcing it".
Reach out and press: Perceptive Pixel is coming
Tucked away in the corner of Google's after party last night was a large screen with lots of people touching, tapping and zooming pictures and maps in and out. Chatting away with the experimenters was Jeff Han, the man behind Perceptive Pixel and the massively multitouch system that most US TV channels used to analyse results on election night in 2008.