Monthly Archives: November 2007

8 posts

IE in decline amongst blog readers

If you look at the browser usage stats IE is generally shown with 78-83% and Firefox with 13 – 15%. When I looked at the stats for this blog nearly 35% were Firefox. I wonder if there is a connection between blog readers and Firefox usage?

Building a GeoCommunity – Looking for themes

Just over a week ago the AGI held its annual Awards Dinner – the industries equivalent of the Oscars. Very generously Chris Holcroft, the Director of the AGI gave me his award for the work I did on this years conference. As I said at the time the award should have gone to the whole team who created the conference. A week later and the whole team assembled to kick off the plans for next […]

Q-ing increases shareholder value

There has been a lot of talk about Nokia acquiring Navteq for nearly $7bn and more recently the privatisation and subsequent flotation of DERA with substantial profits for private equity investors and senior management has been in the news. An odd coincidence is that a couple of years ago Navtech changed its name to Navteq, at the time of privatisation the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency became QinetiQ – both of them decided to insert […]

Common sense in government

An interesting article on Free Our Data. In a recent debate on Public Information (Comercial Use) Mark Todd MP and Gareth Thomas, seem to be agreeing on the benefits of the current trading fund model and the need for caution in determining an alternative. Good to see that politicians are seeing through some of the arguments. Could this be the beginning of the end? I doubt it, there is still a Trading Funds Study to […]

The desktop is enterprise

Let me start with a couple of common generalisations: SOA is Enterprise Enterprise implies big and good Desktop means small scale, possibly old fashioned and not so good Now you may quickly dispute those crude statements but I would guess that they will have a slight resonance for you or at the very minimum you will know several people who hold views somewhere close to them. At GDC we were very committed to delivering more […]

Taking service for granted

Recently I have been doing quite a lot of travelling, airports and travel seem to be plagued with hassle. I have flown with BA each time and used their on line check in, meal choices and text warnings of delays and thought “that’s not bad”. I went to Stockholm this week and by mistake flew with another airline, the on-line check-in didn’t work, they did not have self service at Heathrow, self service at Stockholm […]

Lobby FODder

My attention was drawn to an article on eGov Monitor extolling the achievements of the Locus Association in “working with the Government and EU institutions to effectively commercialise public sector information in EU” So who are the Locus Association? According to the article “The Locus Association is a group of private sector companies operating in the Public Sector Information (PSI) marketplace, who come from a range of sectors within the PSI marketplace..” actually it is […]

Governemnt Information Should be Free – we lost the vote but won the argument

On Monday evening I was invited to speak in a debate at the House of Commons organised by the Debating Group opposing the motion “Government Information should be Free”. Speaking for the motion were Michael Cross of the Guardian and the Free Our Data Campaign and Neil Shepherd-Smith, Vanessa Lawrence (DG of OS) and I were opposing. My 16 year old daughter, Flora, who is studying politics could not resist the opportunity to hear her […]