Why email's broken (and how to fix it)

The world sends around 210 billion emails per day (source: the Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report 2015-2019). That's something like 30 per man, woman and child on the planet. Every day. That's a lot of messages.

Roughly 4 petabytes give or take and depending on whose figure you trust. Or 4 with 15 zeros after it characters. By way of comparison, the text of Wikipedia's 5.3 million English articles contain only about 3 millionths of that data, which is still enough to fill 2398 printed volumes.

So by any measure, we generate a lot of email traffic. But here's the thing. Most of that traffic is wasted.

To demonstrate, I did a little very non scientific experiment - I found a recent 10 message email conversation in my inbox, and copy-pasted the useful text (i.e. the complete last message with all of the replies below) into a text editor. Then I compared this with the size in my actual mailbox. What I found was that while the messages in the mailbox were about 650kB, the actual text, even allowing for the hidden meta data that identifies the messages, sender and so on, were more like 30kB. One of the messages took 74,000 characters for me to say simply, "I can do 8:30 tomorrow, yes".

Is it any wonder our mailboxes are flooded and overflowing? And that the young and trendy are increasingly moving to messaging apps?

Email is old by computing standards - the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) will be 35 this year. It has been improved a lot for security and spam prevention, but it's still the same basic, simple system where sending mail servers look up the 'mail exchanger' for a domain and send the message to it. No proprietary protocols or software (like WhatsApp), no per message charges (like SMS) and if everyone implemented encryption in transit it could be fairly secure (not everyone does though...). The simplicity and openness is why it refuses to die, especially in the business world.

But the reason for the bloat is nothing to do with the venerability of the protocol. There are actually two things. First, we like nicely formatted text, with bold characters, different fonts and even embedded images and so on. So the email needs to include markup, which is the codes that describe the formatting (like a web page) - this makes it bigger (<p class="body-text"> <span color="blue">Yes I agree</span></div> is obviously a lot bigger than 'Yes I agree'). Also it is pretty standard to include a plain text version for 'old' email programs that can't read the rich HTML, which of course no one actually uses these days so that's a waste.

But I can't see any of us giving up our rich text email. I'm old enough to remember text-based email software - I certainly don't want to go back to that. What we could change is the quoted text below the line. Why do we need it? Pretty much all email programs these days have the ability to sort a message by conversation, and behind the scenes they also tell the recipients the unique message identifier that they're responding to to make it more reliable. So why do I need to quote the message I'm replying to? I certainly don't feel the need when I send a text message on my phone or use Skype chat, because the conversation is there for me to read.

So here's an idea. Why don't we all turn off the 'quote message when replying' feature? It'd be weird at first, but we'd soon get used to it. And we'd end up sending a lot less crap with our emails, as well as not getting ourselves into trouble by forwarding something we were told in confidence 12 messages back to someone we shouldn't have. Now who's going to be brave enough to go first???

What's in an operating system?

Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux, iOS, they all have their fans and detractors, but which is actually best?

Personally, I have spent the last 8 or so years avoiding Windows and refusing to pay the premium for Apple devices, so I've for the most part had desktop and laptop computers with Ubuntu Linux, and tablets and phones with Android. This changed a couple of months ago when I decided I needed a low end machine for travelling that was both tablet and laptop, so I bought a cheap Windows 10 convertible laptop/tablet. And it pretty much does everything I want it to do very nicely, even bits of coding. Oh and I also got a second hand Mac mini for a mobile app project I'm working on.

And this has all led me to the conclusion that really, for the majority of people, the operating system isn't important, especially for personal use. What most people do on computers is browse the web, send email, do a bit of document and spreadsheet writing and maybe photo editing. And you can get most major apps for both Android and iOS, and increasingly Windows phone. You can also avoid the 'Microsoft tax' if you use LibreOffice instead of MS office and Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook, although to be fair Office 365 has made that cost much more manageable (I remember when I had an IT support business people got very shocked when buying new computers that they had to spend almost as much again on Office software). All the modern OS's are pretty slick in their own way.

So what's in an operating system? Well, if you are a developer, you are going to want to match what you're developing for. And of course Macs have the best reputation for 'creative' software, although I think Windows has pretty much caught up now. For me, since I still do a fair bit of my own development for Linux webservers, having a Linux machine to do that on makes it a lot easier. For everyone else, it probably doesn't matter that much.

Apple's patent victory is bad news for everyone else

Apple's recent victory in their patent dispute with Samsung is bad news for the rest of us. Why? Because it will stifle innovation, as smaller businesses will be less willing to innovate in the space Apple occupies for fear of litigious bullying by the world's most highly valued company. This means less competition and therefore less choice for consumers.

Patents were originally designed to protect inventors from having their inventions copied and used by others. They were not designed to allow already massive companies to consolidate their dominant market position. Apple is not the only culprit - did you know that when you buy an Android device, a few dollars go to Microsoft in patent royalties despite the platform being built on the open source Linux operating system which Microsoft had nothing to do with, and in fact did its best to crush?

Patents, especially in the US, need urgent reform. A first step would be to limit the ability to enforce them to smaller companies. This would encourage small companies to develop new products, while forcing the behemoths to compete by just building better products. The irony of all of this is that Apple does build excellent products that have a massive fan base. They could just compete successfully on that basis, instead of trying to shut out the competition.

The ZX Spectrum is 30!

So today, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum turns 30. Apart from making me feel my age, this seems like quite a milestone because I, like many others in the UK software industry, learnt to program by messing around with that little black box.

The machine was designed to keep cost to a minimum, and also to allow people to write their own programs very quickly and simply. When you switched the machine on, you got a flashing cursor which you could instantly use to start writing a program and electrical stores were constantly filled with screens where some spotty kid (like me) had gone and typed in variants of:

10 PRINT "James woz ere"

20 GOTO 10

Computer magazines in the 80s came with programs you could type in (it was only later that they started sticking a cassette to the front so you could bypass the typing), and even if you were just in it for the games you had to type a BASIC command, LOAD "", to get going.

In 2012, we have computers several times more powerful than a Spectrum in each of our credit cards, and our desktop computers have around 100,000 times more memory. It would take about 100 Spectrums just to hold a single 4 minute MP3. And yet, we are completely dependent on stuff other people have built. Gone are the days when the curious kid could open their Christmas present and within 10 minutes be making it say rude things about their siblings in flashing letters. I suspect that for my children and most of their peers, the first computer they actually own will be a cheap Android tablet or an iPod Touch. Fantastic machines of course, but to even begin to program them you need to hook them up to a desktop machine on which you've installed a development environment. Not exactly conducive to casual tinkering is it?

If we want, as a nation, to stay near the forefront of software as it becomes all-pervasive, rather than just consume the stuff as we do with many other things, we need to find a way of inspiring children to program. It's great to see projects such as the Raspberry Pi, and a recognition within government that ICT in schools needs to be about more than learning to use Word and Excel. But as parents, we also need to do our bit.

I've written code since the age of 10 so it's easy for me to get excited about it. As with anything where you create something from nothing, from painting to house-building to cooking to engineering, programming is fantastically rewarding because you are making something which no one has made before. It also requires and encourages you to be both analytical and creative at the same time, things I certainly want to encourage in my own kids.

So, with this in mind, here are a couple of useful links:
Scratch, kids' programming language
Alice, "an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation..."
This book for kids (and adults!) who want to learn to program

It's great to see that my generation who grew up with their Spectrums (yes and the C64, BBC Micro and so on as well) is beginning to realise that in the search for usability we've lost something along the way and is beginning to do something about it.

Reform patents for the modern world

I've blogged about this before I know, but this article outlining how a patent troll is now exhorting taxpayers' money from US transit authorities really shows how broken the patent system is, especially in the USA but also elsewhere.

So, here are my three proposals to make it better. I'm sure no one will act on any of them, but it makes me feel better to post them online!

1. Exclude Patent Trolls
This is the most important, and will stop people buying up patents cheaply (from liquidations for example) and then making money off them without contributing anything to the wider economy. The way to do it is that if you create a new patent, you have 3 years to bring a product to market before the patent lapses. If you buy a patent from someone else, you have 18 months. If you bought the patent then you cannot claim compensation for patent infringement until you have brought a product to market.

This would still protect innovators by giving them ample time to bring a product to market to validate their patent, but immediately shut out those who only have patents for the purposes of extracting money from others.

2. Narrow the scope of what can be patented
You should not be able to patent an idea, only a way of implementing it. Or to put it another way, you should only be able to patent algorithms or mechanical/technical solutions, not the way they might look. So Amazon would not be able to patent one-click purchases per se, only the way of implementing them. But Dyson would be able to patent its cyclone technology. It would also prevent the ridiculous situation like where one of the biggest beneficiaries of the success of Android smartphones is Microsoft, due to patent claims, despite their historical hostility to and attempts to undermine its Linux/open source foundations.

3. Put a limit on the revenue you can generate from a patent before it becomes unenforceable
This is probably more controversial and difficult to implement, but my argument is that a company of the size of Apple or Samsung should be competing on its ability to innovate and produce designs that consumers want quicker then it's competitors, and that it should not be able to lock others out because it has a patent for a rectangular computing device based on touch input. The patent wars these companies fight mean higher prices for consumers and they make it much harder for smaller companies to enter the market.

Anyone really have any objections to this? I think the only people who stand to lose are intellectual property lawyers and patent trolls.

Mobile Web Apps

Nuvola has been doing some interesting work recently with mobile web applications, and thought I'd share some of the benefits we're helping our clients see from this approach.

Firstly, I'm talking here about business software rather than mobile websites aimed at consumers, although mobile websites are certainly a growth area which I'll be blogging about in the near future no doubt. But this article is about how to use mobile web applications to enable field staff to keep up to date, and most importantly keep the rest of the business up to date on what they are doing.

Today, we launched version 2 of a mobile web application for our long standing client, AzteQ Solutions. AzteQ does IT maintenance and installation, one of whose largest customers provides point of sale services to retailers - they subcontract their installation and maintenance to AzteQ.

Previously, Nuvola had built a solution where engineers received and accepted job details by SMS, but the new mobile app takes things one step further. It provides full features to accept and close jobs, and to log movements of stock. Basically it puts the full power of AzteQ's job management system literally in the hands of engineers in the field - I guess it's pretty obvious how beneficial that can be in terms of operational efficiency.

But the really interesting thing about this is that because it is a web application, it really doesn't matter what sort of smartphone the engineer has, and there is no installation or maintenance of the device necessary - just a URL. It has all the security measures in place for a traditional web app, and it can also be used easily by subcontractors without having to supply them with expensive equipment. We used the jQuery Mobile framework to build it, which gives you the easy look and feel of an iPhone or Android app, but as a set of web pages that are a natural part of their existing system.

For me, this really is the way forward in terms of mobile development. But of course the one drawback is that it only works if you have an internet connection, and this is why the other mobile web app we're working on is really exciting. It will allow engineers for another field service business to take readings when they're in plant rooms and the like with no mobile coverage, and then sync them back to a main server where anything out of the ordinary can automatically be flagged back to the customer. All from just a URL sent to their smartphones.

With some mobile field service systems selling at well over £1000 per handset (and that's before you've bought software and services), it's great that there is now a real way of bringing some of this functionality within the reach of the smaller business.

January Blues?

I thought it was really time, now that we're well into January, that I wrote some ramblings on my thoughts for 2012. Apparently this is the most depressing week of the year, so I'll try to be a bit more positive!

One of the really exciting things from my perspective is that a lot of commentators are predicting that this will be the year when Cloud Computing really takes off. 2011 I guess was the time where it entered the mainstream consciousness, so will 2012 see everyone moving their business systems to The Cloud?

Well, here's the thing. There is still a lot of scepticism out there around whether putting all of your key business information systems in a data centre somewhere is a sensible thing to do. The worry is that if your internet connection goes down, you lose access to everything. If you have a server in your office and you lose access to the internet, you can still open documents, schedule jobs etc. Not only that, but you need fast internet for things to work.

Well now this is true, and certainly for those with unreliable or slow internet connections (which is still quite a problem in rural areas), it would certainly be a worry. But for the rest of us, network speeds are improving and BT's rollout of their 21CN (21st Century Network) is leading to a national broadband network that is much more reliable and fault tolerant. When did your internet last go down, and how long for?

The other concern is often cost, because people compare the cost of a hosted office server, for example, with a bit of physical kit in their office and in some cases find the hosted option costs more. These costs are coming down of course, and you should also be considering what exactly you need. The benefit of a Cloud server is that you should be able to pay just for what you use, rather than having a whole powerful machine sitting idle most of the time. So it's up to hosting companies and consultants like me to help our customers make the right choices.

Also never underestimate the value of not having to worry about things like backup, and being able to access everything from anywhere if you can't get to your office. I was recently talking to our hosting partner, Dudobi, about virtual disaster recovery sites. While traditionally having a DR solution meant having real hardware and desks on standby at prohibitive costs, you can now have your data sync'd to a virtual backup server, with virtual desktop computers ready to be brought online for staff forced to work from home or serviced offices. Since you're really only paying for storage and a little data sync (which is pretty cheap), this can work out at just a few hundred pounds a year, and then an hourly charge if you have to use it.

So I think it's very exciting that these facilities are within the reach of even very small businesses, and I do think that 2012 will be the year where business people start to see the benefits from them.

I am optimistic then. And yes, it's cold and grey now, but in a few weeks the daffodils will start coming out and we'll all start to feel like spring!

Salesforce wants to be Facebook

I was at a client yesterday who happens to use Salesforce.com as their CRM software, when I heard one of the sales team who had just returned from maternity leave exclaim 'Salesforce wants to be Facebook!'. This was followed by grumbles of agreement from her colleagues.
She was referring to the fact that the pioneer of Cloud software now invites you to connect with other users and to share things, in the same way as Facebook, LinkedIn et al do.
It got me thinking that this is an interesting trend where everyone and everything wants to copy the social networking model. Indeed, it's a tribute to the success of these sites when something as 90s as a CRM system (albeit one that came along in the 2000s and shook up the established players) is copying their features.
So is this just a large dose of 'me too' from Salesforce, or do these social features really add something? The additions are certainly treated with a healthy dose of cynicism by their users (a quick and highly unscientific straw poll of friends who use Salesforce drew similar sighs of derision).
Yet, one of the biggest problems with implementing CRM systems has always been getting salespeople to enter data into them, which can then be shared with others in the business to positive effect. I would argue that since social networking is now one of the main ways in which people are used to sharing stuff, applying the same principles should make it easier to share business information with colleagues.
It all sounds great in theory, but will it really work in practice? Well, there are already (and have been for a while) project collaboration tools (e.g. Huddle, Basecamp) that look not a million miles from social networking. And the trend in database back ends at the moment is towards less structured, flexible designs which can store information in different formats, and lend themselves more to the data streams of social networking than traditional records and child records.
So I wouldn't be hugely surprised if the next big enterprise software product looks more like LinkedIn than it does SAP. But what's more likely is that other CRM and project management products will integrate themselves much more with social networking tools and the lines between them all will become increasingly blurred

Book Launch - how to become information conscious

So, after several months in the making and a few last minute hitches sorting out the layout and finding a printer (I can highly recommend Imprint Digital), my book 'Through The Cloud' is now ready and can be purchased directly from us at http://www.nuvola.co.uk/Book.

It is on the surface a book about cloud computing because I feel this is a paradigm that is transforming the way we use technology. It's actually much more than this though: I have shared my experience of implementing software in businesses of all sizes to create a step by step method for business owners to realise the benefits that the cloud can offer largely by themselves.

The major insight that I have taken from thirteen years in IT consulting is that technology projects which are seen as some sort of 'magic wand' to solve business problems on their own invariably fail to deliver to expectations; projects which are grounded in solving real, quantifiable business issues and improving information flow tend to be successful.

The flip side of this is that those businesses who understand the role that information plays in their business, and put in place systems and processes to make it flow properly and extract the management data they need tend to be more successful. These 'information conscious' organisations are scalable and get the best out of their staff by providing them with the information they need to do their job.

'Through The Cloud' is a step by step guide to becoming information conscious, getting the best from all the cloud technologies available and using that as a platform for business growth.

Service Management Exhibition

On Tuesday, I'm speaking at the Service Management Exhibition at Birmingham's NEC, which for those who don't know it is populated by those trying to sell stuff, especially technology, to the field service industry. I'm doing a talk entitled "effective field service technology at a reasonable cost". I'll be looking at how to make the most of the mobile devices that field operatives already have rather than investing in expensive new kit.
Apart from the rather cool fact that I'm following one of my childhood heroes on the podium (Maggie Philbin, more so for Tomorrow's World than Swap Shop), I'm really looking forward to the chance to connect with business owners about the exciting opportunities new technology has to offer.
So come down if you can, entry is free if you pre-register at www.servicemanagement.co.uk

The demise of HP tablets and the future of mobile

Last week, the big American PC and server manufacturer HP announced that it's to withdraw from the PC, Tablet and Mobile market and sell that part of its business.

In a way, there's nothing that surprising about this: IBM did a similar thing a few years ago, which is why you now see Lenovo ThankPads rather than IBM ThinkPads. PCs are a very low margin business.

What is interesting is that a little over a year ago, HP bought out Palm, the people behind the original handheld PDA (remember the PalmPilot?). Their main reason was to acquire webOS, Palm's platform for mobiles. The concept behind webOS was that the user interface should work in the same way as a web browser, and apps should be coded using web technologies. Palm believed that the future lay in using web technologies for other things, like mobile apps which should work just as well without a connection as with one.

In that respsect they were prescient. I've blogged about this before. A world in which, as an app developer, you only have to build one version (rather than ones for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia etc), and in which you sell your app and any content with it just with a URL and without having to pay a middle-man a cut is far more appealing than the currect fragmented scenario. Indeed, Amazon have thrown down the gauntlet by releasing their 'Kindle Cloud Reader', an e-reader which allows you to download your Kindle library to your web browser and read it offline. It works every bit as well as their Android and iPhone apps, allows them to circumvent Apple's 30% charge for in-app purchases and is very much a statement from an industry thought leader that this is the way of the future. And let's not forget Microsoft's plans for an HTML5/Javascript app store for Windows 8.

The reason HP have decided to ditch their investment in Palm and webOS is, paradoxically, the same reason webOS was such an innovative product in the first place. The world is moving towards web apps, so platform is less important. This makes it far harder to differentiate the product. And while we're still in transition from 'native' apps, iOS, Android and Blackberry all have much healthier app stores.

The problem is that Palm, the original innovators whose influence can be seen all over the way you interact with an iPhone or iPad, just didn't have the cachet of Apple, the sheer force of Google or even the slow drip that led to Blackberry's success. It's a market that is increasingly (despite the bumbling attempts of Microsoft and Nokia) converging on three platforms: iOS, Blackberry and Android. It's not hugely disimilar from the Mac vs PC situration that has dominated the PC market for years, you might think.

There's are a couple of important differences though. The first is that the emergence of HTML5 and web apps à la Kindle Cloud Reader that work offline means that the type of operating system that runs your tablet is less important. There will be no equivalent to "well we need to run XYZ so we need Windows". The second key fact is that while Microsoft was always a software vendor with an interest in locking people in to Microsoft products, the modern day equivalent in mobile, Google, is not. Google runs on advertising revenue, so you can be sure it will find a way that web app developers can include Google ads in their apps no matter what platform they run on. And Google also has a history of encouraging and leading innovation in the web arena. So the upshot of all of this is that, once the world has moved away from native to web apps, which I think will take about 5 years, there will then be the space for someone to come in with a really revolutionary design for a mobile operating system which takes full of advantage of all of this.

And what of webOS? Well unfortunately it will go the way of many products that were ahead of their time and couldn't gain market traction, and either find itself a small niche somewhere or be left to die. Which is unfortunate because it could have been well placed to ride the web app wave.

The Space Shuttle? It's been emotional

Am I the only one who felt emotional watching Atlantis lift off on the last ever space shuttle mission this afternoon? I remember watching the first launch as an excited 6 year old, went to see the test orbiter Enterprise on its visit to the UK when I was 8, and cried when Challenger exploded when I was 11. For a geeky kid, the Shuttle was an important part of my childhood. So watching the final launch with my 4 year old today felt pretty special, and I definitely welled up as Atlantis cleared the tower.
Looking back over the 30 years of the Shuttle programme, it's amazing how much has changed in the world and in technology. In 1981, who could have imagined that part of the contingency in the event of problems with the last mission would involve a Russian Soyuz, or that I'd be watching the buildup to the launch on my computer and writing about it on a touch screen tablet.
The Shuttle was definitely of its time and I guess I have to grudgingly admit that it's run its course - there isn't really the appetite for spending billions of public money on sending a glorified plane into orbit any more.
But I feel it has given us two key things, apart from the obvious scientific advances of things like the Hubble space telescope and the International Space Station. First, it's shown that mankind still has the curiosity to explore things for their own sake. That's how we produced science and engineering and got to where we are now, so long my it continue. Secondly, it's paved the way for the commercial exploration of space. Will that be the big area of technological change this century?

The broken US patent system is damaging innovation and needs to be fixed

Reading through the tech news sites this morning, I noticed yet another patent spat, this time between Samsung and Apple, who are each trying to claim the other has stolen their intellectual property and to block each others' imports into the US.

This is yet another example of large technology companies trying to beat each other up with patents of questionable value. One of Apple's patents is about the basic design of a touch screen phone, which rather seems like Ford trying to sue Volkswagen for selling a car with four wheels and an engine. In another development, a consortium of companies including Apple and Research in Motion (the people behind the Blackberry) has just agreed the purchase (to the tune of $4.5bn) of a portfolio of patents from the bankrupt Canadian telecoms giant Nortel.

The original idea of patents was to protect inventors and entrepreneurs, so that they were safe from having their ideas stolen by large companies. What we now have is the opposite. Small companies can struggle to innovate because some large company or patent troll (companies who buy up patents and then launch legal actions based on them, who don't actually make anything) will threaten them with a law suit which they'll struggle to fight. In the end we have out-of-court settlements in which the big boys pay each other money, and all that happens is that lawyers get rich. We end up with ridiculous situations like the fact that for every mobile sold which runs Google's Android system, a few dollars is paid to Microsoft, who have always been the antithesis of Android's open source roots and certainly haven't made any contribution to the core Linux operating system which it's built on. These patents often only apply in the US, but given the size of that market they have a global effect.

The USA seriously needs to address its patent system. I would suggest two measures. First, in order to enforce a patent, a company must have made and sold a product which used it within the last 5 years. This would get rid of the patent trolls, while protecting businesses who actually innovate and use their patents. Secondly, and this would be much harder to get past the big corporate lobbyists, companies over a given market capitalisation should not be able to enforce patents. This would mean patents protect small and growing businesses who actually need the protection, not large established players trying to cement their domination of a market.

Tablet wars and the shape of things to come

So, HP has just released its first tablet computer since it bought Palm and webOS a year or so ago. Generally it's had good reviews, and is apparently almost as slick as the iPad. The main complaint is that it lacks the number of apps that Apple, or indeed Android, have available.

What's really interesting though is that it is basically one big web browser, with some really nice effects thrown in. This means that apps are written, like web applications, using HTML and Javascript.

Why should you care? Well, the implication is that an app made for webOS should work with just a little modification in a normal web browser or other system built around web browser principles, which is exactly what Microsoft appears to be planning if the previews of Windows 8 are anything to go by. This would mean that apps would run on anything and the vendors have to compete on the quality of their products rather than how much software runs on them, as Microsoft have certainly done in the past.

Won't it be refreshing if you can run the same app on Windows, Apple, Android, webOS or whatever just as it doesn't matter if you're reading this blog in Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari? That's the future of computing...

Why Facebook won't put Google out of business

I came across this interesting and well argued article the other day suggesting that Facebook could very easily put Google out of business. The reason, argues the author (Ben Elowitz, who is someone who knows a bit about online publishing), is that Facebook's treasure trove of social connections and 'likes' means it can place ads which are highly targeted to the user's tastes. Google can't do that, it can only target what you search on, so online advertisers will desert Google for Facebook, and its linked search engines, Bing and Yahoo!

Whilst its certainly true that being able to target the user's exact tastes provides an offering that must have advertsising professionals salivating, there are a couple of problems with this argument. The first is that, despite Mark Zuckerberg's talk about the social web and that in future you will follow your friends' recommendations rather than just searching for keywords, there is still a massive need for the ability to search on stuff that your friends might not know anything about. And while we'll start seeing the Facebook search function expanded from just friend searches soon, the company whose name has given us a verb meaning 'to search online' is not going to go away in a hurry, even ignoring it's Johnny-come-lately '+1' button. And where there are search results, keyword marketing (especially if it's informed by a user's search and click history) is still a very powerful tool.

But still, if this were the only thing in Google's arsenal, I'd be inclined to think Elowitz might be right. But I think the one thing missing from his argument is where Google's looking to expand, which is 'The Cloud', or running your software applications through a web browser rather than on your computer. Google is really leading the way in this. The Google Docs and Google Apps service has really pushed the boundaries, making it possible for the first time to have a serious business computer that only has a web browser on it (in fact, Google has just released a computer which is exactly that). Yes Microsoft has similar apps, but the thought leadership is really coming out of Mountain View. And Google's marketplace is also allowing innovative third party Cloud software providers to hook into Google Apps and get the marketing boost that goes with that.

With lots of Cloud software users, we are likely to see that users will spend an increasing proportion of their working life on Google, alongside the increasing proportion of their personal life spent on Facebook. And with lots of users using a service for a lot of time comes an opportunity to target marketing at people that Google knows quite a bit about.

So I would say that yes, we are seeing the rise of Facebook, but don't sound the death knell for Google just yet!

Is the UK's mobile internet too slow?

Have you ever tried to get online on your smartphone on a city commuter train and watched your connection grind to a halt despite a strong signal as everyone else does the same? Or tried to do anything serious online from an intercity train? Or even tried to browse the web in an out of the way place? You probably don't need me to tell you that mobile internet access in the UK can be patchy, to be polite.

Some new research by eBay, quoted in this article by Startups.co.uk, goes so far as to say that this is costing the UK economy around £1.3bn a year in lost e-commerce sales because people simply give up trying to complete their transactions.

It certainly can be extremely frustrating trying to do anything online if you're using a mobile. Apart from the general slowness of mobile connections, the mobile user experience on a lot of websites is lacking.

While smartphone screens are beginning to have a good enough resolution to make regular websites readable, the design of the sites themselves often make them very hard to use on mobile devices. Often, especially if you have fat fingers like me, you need to zoom in just to use the navigation. And frequent page loads combined with slow connections can make you give up on some sites as the loading bar sits stationary again...

We still have a long way to go before these amazing little devices in our pockets give the same experience as a proper computer with a proper network connection. The way we're going to get there is by companies like eBay who stand to make the biggest gains, and the consumers who are queueing up to use their services, pushing the network operators better connections. eBay have made a formal complaint to Ofcom, which is a start. A supposedly high speed connection taking a minute to load a page just isn't good enough. But there also needs to be a responsibility on the web design and development community to think about how their sites will be used on a mobile, and to push their clients to this mindset as well.

The future of mobile apps

One thing that strikes me at the moment is how fragmented the mobile devices market is. Currently there are five major platforms competing (Apple iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry) along with a couple of smaller players, and it's not clear that any of them are going to emerge victorious in the way that Microsoft did in the desktop computing space in the 90s.
This is a problem for app developers, who currently need to port their software to all of these different incompatible operating systems, which is a costly and time-consuming process. Because of this, we are beginning to see cross-platform application frameworks such as PhoneGap, which allow developers to build what are essentially web apps, then run them as if they were native apps on the various different devices with access to the phone's storage, offline access and so on.
For developers, this is a very appealing way of doing things, especially since it requires the same tools (HTML5, CSS and Javascript) that web developers know anyway.
So my belief is that we are not going to see a single platform become dominant in the mobile market, which has to be a good thing as none will be able to choke off innovation as happened for a while in the desktop arena. What we will see is that apps start being built on a common platform, namely HTML5.
If I'm right on this, the company to watch is HP. HP acquired Palm in 2010, and with it the webOS operating system for mobile devices. What's unique about webOS is that it is in effect a big web browser, and all of it's apps are written using web technologies. So which platform might be best placed to take advantage of a shift in app development to these technologies?
Maybe we need to add a sixth major player to the list...

Standing on the shoulders of giants - why I love PHP development

Anyone who knows me might have heard me talk about the benefits of open source software, but it is something that, if you're not technical, often goes over people's heads. I wanted to use a specific example to demonstrate why the open source principle is so good.

I'm doing some work at the moment for Nuvola's long standing client, AzteQ Solutions Ltd, to expand on the inventory management extensions we've already built to their job and management system. Specifically, they need to print physical pick and packing notes for their warehouse operatives, one of which they will carry around the warehouse while they pick the job, and the other which will be attached to the package when it gets shipped. They wanted automation in this - pick jobs should just appear on the printer, rather than the warehouse staff having to go to a computer and print them. The pick and packing notes should also be saved as PDFs.

Having a remotely hosted web application do this presented a bit of a problem, until I came across internet printing protocol (IPP), which basically uses the same technology that my browser will use to publish this article to send a job to a printer over the internet.

Being a good PHP developer (that's the programming language we use), I immediately Googled 'PHP IPP' and quickly found that someone had already built a nice library of code which would handle all of the printer connection and job for me. There's also a similar library which I've used before to create PDFs from web pages.

So here's the beauty of open source. Rather than spending days having to get to grips with creating PDF documents automatically, and then more days working out how to send stuff to a printer over the internet, I was able to write about 4 lines of very simple code (open connection, set file to print, send print job) to do each function. Someone else had done all the hard work!

Easy life for a lazy programmer then, I hear you say! Well, possibly, but the way in which open source works tends to go something like this: Somebody has a need to do something a bit out of the ordinary on a particular project. They write some code to do it and that code works well. Then, when they have time, they sanitise the code a bit so it can be used by anyone, and publish it so that everyone can benefit. Why do they do this? Because they've had the benefit of re-using other people's work themselves in the past, and want to give something back. Everyone (including clients and end users) benefits in terms of shorter development times, simplified testing and reduced costs. As I said, standing on the shoulders of giants.

So, when do I plan to give something back? Well, Nuvola's framework does contain quite a lot of nice, reusable libraries and bits of code. Some of it is rather woven into the fabric of the framework itself and so difficult to package in a way that someone could just take it and plug it into their own project, but other parts are much more 'detachable' and certainly candidates for being shared. Watch this space - I'll be publishing some of those libraries in the coming months.