Category Archives: Technology

Finding a new mountain to climb

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

My Niece very bravely played hostess to the family over New Year at her place in Crystal Palace – a hilltop suburb of London that gives excellent views of the city skyline.

The NTL/Arqiva transmitter near Croydon - one of a number of amazing structures and facilities I was privileged to visit and, on a few occasions climb, when I worked for the company in the 1990s

I know the area quite well from my time in the broadcast industry in the early 1990s as it is home to two significant structures that have played key roles in broadcasting history – not just in the UK, but worldwide too. On the site of the original Crystal Palace stands the Crystal Palace transmitting station and a few miles down the road stands the Croydon transmitting station. I visited these stations quite a bit during my early days with NTL as they were often a focal point for the demonstration and launch of new digital broadcasting and telecommunication services . It was always fascinating to get an inside view of these amazing structures and the operations centres that sat beneath them and also to talk with the engineers who maintained the analogue services and were key to developing and implementing the new digital ones.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my experiences working for Lucent’s mobile/3G operations at the beginning of the century echoed those in the broadcast industry as it was during those pioneering days when there were many possibilities with what the technology could achieve but some very big mountains to climb to get there .

So, sitting in my Niece’s front room after the New Year’s celebrations were done and dusted, thoughts turned to what all those activities had led to 20 years on in broadcasting and 10 years on in the mobile web. Continue reading →

Playing the Logo Game

Beyond the overt commercialism and religious hypocrisy debates about the Christmas break, it is a great time for families to get together and play together.  It’s often said, ‘the family that plays together, stays together’ and while we can all ‘make’ the time and opportunity to do this at other times of the year, life often gets in the way – so, for me, the Christmas and New Year break will always serve an excellent purpose in the opportunity it provides for family fun.

I also like the fact that despite the relentless rise of sophisticated electronic toys and computer games, the humble ‘board game’ still finds a space in many families’ collective entertainment experiences. Continue reading →

(20)11 predictions from the CMS coal face

I was described recently as a “self-proclaimed crusader on behalf of buyers”. Despite the rather condescending tone and context of the comment, I have heard from others that alternative views of web marketing and information management from those who spend each and every day as practitioners is welcome. Those practitioners who do post comment tend to get their voices drowned out of social media by the vendors, analysts and commentators who shout a lot louder and a lot more frequently.  So in the interests of living up to that label, here are some predictions for the coming year from the CMS coal face… Continue reading →

(20)10 lessons learned

The growth and evolution of social media often puts a different emphasis on the approaches to ‘blogging’ but I still like to use this site as a ‘weblog’ in its more traditional sense – as defined well over a decade ago…

A weblog often has the quality of being a kind of “log of our times” from a particular point-of-view. Generally, weblogs are devoted to one or several subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their particular themes. A weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated discussions.

So, the following post is a mixture of business and personal lessons learned from the last 12 months – if it proves useful to others reading, that is a bonus in this instance as its primary purpose is to log some thoughts to review at a later date… Continue reading →