Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, [...]
The death of Arthur C Clarke at the age of 90 reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now, about our certainty in the 1950s and 60s that in the future we would have interstellar travel and colonies in space. That future may still exist, although to my mind [...]
I’ve been reading Keith Roberts’ 1960s SF novel Pavane, set in a modern England in which Elizabeth I had been assassinated in 1588, the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and the Catholic Church had triumphed - in England and in the rest of northern Europe. At the start of the novel, the grip of the [...]
I’ve been reading Watt’s Perfect Engine, by Ben Marsden, which I suppose can be described as the biography of an invention. Even allowing for the fact that it’s written from a modern perspective, it’s striking how many of the lessons resonate with contemporary innovation.
I blogged last week about the potential impact of expensive energy on the future shape of the internet. Now it turns out that Sun has already started changing the design of its computer systems to favour efficiency rather than performance because of energy costs. It seems to have moved them to a different market space [...]
One of the most consistently interesting thinkers online about the long-term future of industrial society is John Michael Greer, who takes an impressively long-term and wide ranging (if also pessimistic) view of civilizational change. In his recent post Back Up The Rabbit Hole, he speculated on the way in which the ‘ultra cheap energy’ [...]
Two manufacturers have caught the eye at the current round of car shows - and they’re not from Europe or the United States. At the Delhi Auto Expo, Tata has been been breaking visitor records with its Nano car - at 100,000 rupees (less than £1,500) a time. In Detroit, meanwhile, Toyota is talking the [...]
The first post I wrote on this blog, in April this year, was on the arts and technology consultancy Proboscis and their Snout collaboration, designed to help communities develop “environmental authoring” tools to monitor their local environments. Now Nokia has trialed a phone which would do some of the same things, including some environment monitoring, [...]
According to new figures from Ofcom, 4 out of 10 of British internet users now use social networking sites - and those that do spend more than 5 hours a month on social networking sites, and return 23 times a month. Usage is heavier than elsewhere in Europe, and above the USA, but behind [...]
Mobile payments have at last reached the stage in the UK where trials and pilots are starting. Barclays Bank, O2, and Transport for London has announced a trial of a combined transport/payments card in London (news report here), while RBS and MasterCard have announced a trial of a mobile debit card in London and Edinburgh [...]
