Reading the reports of questions to Ian Duncan-Smith by the Work and Pensions select committee one is left baffled by the casual attitude of the minister and DWP officials to a £40m write off of software code for the Universal Credit system that is effectively useless. What planet are these guys on? A couple of choice quotes via the Guardian from IDS and his minions: On rewriting code (Mike Driver, Financial Director) Glenda Jackson is asking questions […]
Yearly Archives: 2013
11 posts
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Purcell Street Problem and why I disagreed with Charles Arthur’s assessment in his article “Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won“. Charles weighed in with a couple of comments and then we let it drop although I still thought that there was something that didn’t feel right about the usage stats. A couple of days ago Charles published another article “How Apple […]
It’s odd how things come together sometimes. This morning I was reading Charles Arthur’s article on the Guardian “Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won“. The article is based upon a ComScore report which suggests that usage of the standalone Google Maps app on US iPhones has fallen off sharply as users switch to using the default Apple Maps app which is now the default within iOS 6 and 7. The article […]
A couple of months ago I was at an industry event in the UK with a colleague from Astun Technology (I’m a strategic adviser to the board at Astun and have been helping them to grow their business). We bumped into someone, let’s call him Mr X, who is a well known senior figure within the UK geoworld who on discovering that I was attending the event with Astun said something like “What are you doing […]
It’s the beginning of Maptember, who could have imagined this cacophony of mapping events in the UK over 30 days? Ken Field suggests in his blog that there may be too many events competing for the same audience, perhaps he is correct – even the most committed conference participants can’t attend all of these events. We will have to wait for Maptober to know which events flourished and if any struggled to fill their seats. […]
Not really 🙁 This spoof press release from Royal Mail appeared to day on the internetty thing. If only it was for real! I had nothing to do with it but I wish I had
Royal Mail just launched a consultation on simplifying the PAF license, actually you can only view their proposals at the moment as the consultation portal isn’t yet open for comments but at least it gives you a head start to formulate your opinions. It seems to me that Royal Mail are the most unreformed anti OpenData organisation within the public sector. Buoyed up by their inflated ideas of the value of the business in […]
https://youtu.be/U-Y0SMitMpk Apologies for the oddly targeted adverts in the video above but that’s the cost of free. We don’t have an option to vote or even express opinions on individual items of government expenditure in the UK, so I can’t say I’d like to spend £10bn on rail subsidies or pay 2p in the pound tax on the NHS or on education or 0p on Trident nuclear weapons (I haven’t got a clue whether those […]
My friend Ed Freyfogle of Lokku, Nestoria and #geomob fame and I, have been talking for a while about business opportunities around OpenStreetMap. After all Nestoria have been using OSM in the background for a long time and at the end of 2011 they switched the mapping on their various web properties from Google to OSM with very successful results, they know the data pretty much back to front and they’ve got some hot engineering […]
It has been ages since I last sat down to write a post. That is because I have been massively busy working on client stuff, particularly with the great team at Astun, and chairing FOSS4G has been a lot more work than I anticipated and a lot more fun and there have been a few other projects that I am involved with including OSM-GB and Taarifa [plug for my clients and projects over]. The common […]
Contrary to what you might think looking at the frequency of posts for the last 6-8 months this is not a dead blog. I have been mega busy but that is a feeble excuse. At last week’s GeoMob Ed Freyfogle told me I needed to blow out the cobwebs and get back to blogging. So here goes, I started by having a spring clean on the site and installed a snazzy new theme Customizr – needs […]