Monthly Archives: February 2011

Information Management and the Theory of Everything

Information Theory was fundamental to NTL's work on digital compression in the early 1990s and also key to me being able to design and produce this industry guide using the early versions of Photoshop and Quark

The first time I became aware of the work of Claude E. Shannon and the landmark paper on Information Theory he published while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s was when I worked for NTL’s Advanced Products Division and had to try to understand the principles of digital video compression to promote the company’s innovations in digital broadcast technologies.

Shannon’s Information Theory was absolutely fundamental to the encoding, transmission and decoding processes used to make digital broadcasting a reality. It also became clearer to me at that time that Information Theory sat at the heart of everything I was involved in following the transition from analogue content creation and publishing processes to digital processes, that had begun, for me, with the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s/early 90s and continued with the arrival and growth of the web.

Information Theory however is concerned with the mechanics of communication and the quantity and readability of the information transmitted. It is not concerned with the quality of that information, its meaning or its importance. For those processes we have what has become known as Information Management – as defined here by AIIM – a practice that has been going on in shifting forms for many decades now.

Continue reading →

The Three Bears – Revisited

I remember tweeting a couple of years back that I had reached 10,000 unopened emails in my Gmail account and asking if anyone else used their Gmail service as a bottomless dumping ground. From the response I received, it was clear that they do. It is, after all, a practice that Google has promoted by saying that you “never have to delete anything again” – so I don’t.

Contrast that with my work email account and having been in my current role less than a year, my Exchange mailbox has already exceeded its limits and I had to do some serious pruning the other day in order to keep on emailing. Despite the storage limits imposed (for sound financial reasons) the vast difference between Exchange and Gmail is still the tremendous speed and accuracy of the Gmail search returns and the inordinate amount of time it takes to search a work account that has a mere fraction of content. Continue reading →

A mobile phone mast in a box

It’s that time of the year again when the great and the good of the world’s mobile technology industry gather in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress . So far this year, there have been plenty of images of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop getting cosy (rather fitting that the first day of this year’s event falls on Valentine’s Day perhaps) as well as the usual parade of the latest and greatest smartphone technologies.

As in previous years however, there are other less glamorous announcements but ones that could make significant differences. In a couple of previous posts going back to 2009, I made comments about the impact of molecular level electronics and how the really useful innovations in energy reduction were happening within the very power-hungry networks themselves. Continue reading →

Having fun with the sun

Saturday in the Hoskins household was Dad and youngest Daughter day as Mum and eldest Daughter went off to the cinema and shopping. It was a nice sunny winter’s day for a change, after several weeks of rain and a great opportunity to play with a toy I bought her for Christmas. As I have daughters and not sons, the usual tradition of fathers buying toys for their sons that they can play with themselves hasn’t really applied in our household to date, as I grew out of playing with dolls when I was about five 😉

The toy is an interesting kit that I spotted a while back that enables you to experiment with solar power. Although it is designed for the 10+ age category, my daughter, who is close to 9, had no problems following the assembly instructions and building the various components from the ‘Airfix’ style kit. That process was a useful lesson in how an electric motor and gears work and also the basic elements of a solar panel. The only fiddly bit was attaching the wires and when I finally twigged that I was making it more complicated than it needed to be, even that was pretty simple.

Continue reading →

I predict a riot!

I had an interesting blog debate with an ex-colleague and friend the other day about the role of social media in the events that have been playing out in the Arab countries of North Africa. The debate centred on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, being a catalyst for these events. My view is that social media’s role is being overstated, as many of us have seen this type of thing happen before in our lives and a long time before social media became prominent. I remember the world watching in amazement as a similar domino effect played out in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s at a time when the web was just a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. More recently, it has been recognised that social media has been turned against the Iranian people following the Green Revolution a couple of years ago, so I really think we need to assess the catalysts and aftermath of these events with the benefit of hindsight. (note:- here is a very good ‘middle ground’ perspective on this found by John Goode, my sparring partner in this debate and also an interesting BBC piece on ‘How revolutions happen’ )

I get a sense though that even within the next couple of years, the spiritual home of the social media behemoths, like Twitter and Facebook, will experience such a degree of change that the current events in the Arab world will pale in comparison. What will be interesting is how the US people, empowered, as it is believed, by social media, react to the events as they unfold around them.

Continue reading →