The OpenDCU.org site has just been launched.
“The smart home market in the UK (and in most of Europe) is being held back by lack of consumer knowledge and confidence. People aren’t buying because Continued…
OpenDCU.org – kick starting the EU smart-home market?
Posted in Future Cities, Market needs, Technology and development.
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– 2012/11/22
Why the UK’s influence in Europe is larger than you think
I‘ve been looking at the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in a slightly non-standard way, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the UK has a lot more leverage than is often suggested, although that may rely on a credible threat to leave Europe. The rest of Europe would certainly not like to lose our net contribution of around 20% of all the disbursements to net beneficiaries. So let’s have a serious debate about what is needed to make Europe work, and engage constructively in fixing the EU.
Continued…
Posted in Politics.
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– 2012/11/01
Cambridge rules
Yesterday I enjoyed an interesting #smartchat on Twitter on the subject of “Urban Entrepreneurial Ecosystems”. I mentioned that the “Cambridge rules” we often use are an important part of why my own city of Cambridge, UK is such a successful UEE. But I realised that I have never seen the rules written down…
Continued…
Posted in Future Cities.
– 2012/10/04
Why the UK housing market is so broken
And what to do about it
It’s common knowledge that something has gone wrong with the UK housing market. In 1950, the average house cost roughly £40,000 (adjusted for inflation to 2012 values); nowadays it’s around four times that, with the result that rents are sky-high and first time buyers are often in their forties.
Continued…
Posted in Politics.
– 2012/09/28
Lessons from the history of electricity generation
The time has come to take a lead in creating open standards for digital infrastructure suitable for homes in cities of the future.
Posted in Future Cities, Market needs, Politics.
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– 2012/09/18
Stretching the capabilities of Xara Web Designer
Recently, I have been getting to grips with Xara Web Designer. And so far, I am very impressed. The pages it produces look great, and are easy to modify, at least as far as appearance and layout are concerned. But like most graphically-based packages, it has limitations when it comes to going beyond its basic capabities. Or so I initially thought…
Posted in Technology and development.
– 2011/05/05
Sky’s disingenuousness
I see that Sky is getting concerned by the BBC’s Project Canvas. And from their own self-interested point of view, they are right to be scared. I hope that their objections will not change the BBC’s course.
Continued…
Posted in Politics.
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– 2010/03/19
A step forward for remote DVR
It seems that the US supreme court has ruled that services offering remote digital video recording are legal. This Wall Street Journal article gives more details of their decision.
Continued…
Posted in Market needs, Politics, The user perspective.
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– 2009/07/01
Media types for set-top box display
I noticed the other day that Wikipedia has a special stylesheet for the “handheld” media type, and this set me to doing a bit of research… It seems that displaying web pages using the “handheld” css media type is a great way to make pages more readable on TVs.
Continued…
Posted in Technology and development.
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– 2009/05/20
Firefox Google-search hack for international travel
If you ever use Firefox when abroad, I’m guessing you get as irritated as I do when Google helpfully switches search results to the local language. There is a very simple fix which cures this.
Continued…
Posted in Off-topic, Technology and development.
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– 2009/05/17
