adambowie.com

Category: Internet

  • BBC Store – Initial Thoughts

    After much ballyhoo, the BBC Store is finally with us, and well, um, it sells downloads and streams. You buy episodes rather than rent them – although the prices are much of a muchness really with television. And then you play them back via the web, or in due course, mobile apps. To be honest,…

  • Something Digital Advertising Could Fix To Make It Work Better

    You’re flicking through a magazine, idly going through page after page. You’re perhaps looking for an article, but as you scan the pages before you reach the article, something catches your eye. An advertisement. You flick back and read the advertisement. Then you carry on looking for something else to read. You’re watching your favourite…

  • Yahoo Pipes RIP

    Yahoo Pipes was one of those very clever things that not too many people were aware of, but those who did use it, probably quite liked. Essentially you could take feeds of various bits of data and do things with them, using a graphical layout to program your output. In the distant past, I’ve used…

  • Live Video Streaming

    Last week Periscope, the live video streaming app now owned by Twitter, was released for Android. This came a month or two after it was first available on iOS. It isn’t alone in this marketplace – we also had Meerkat which got a leap on Periscope when it was released at SXSW. But the traction…

  • Storage and Backup: Some Personal Experiences

    [Note that this is likely to be duller than usual! It’s mostly written up so that anyone who searches for similar problems might find it useful.] This all began last Wednesday when I noticed an email from Synology inviting me to update the firmware that runs that two NAS drives I own – a DS210j…

  • In “How Can This Be Legal” News…

    A report today in the FT suggests that at least one mobile operator in Europe is planning on putting ad-blocking software into their network, with Google a named target. The software specifically targets web advertising rather than that in apps, and comes from an Israeli company. The reasoning is that networks are seeing massive growth…

  • Twitter List Wrangling

    [NB. This is really to help anyone having the same problem as I had trying to add many accounts to a Twitter list in one go using a third party application. You may wish to skip this entry!] Twitter has had lists for years, but I’ve never made any real effort to use them. It’s…

  • Around the Web

    They’ve been there a while now. At first, just a few. But now they’re everywhere. And the invasion is growing. What am I talking about? “Content Discovery Platforms” typified by those “Around the Web” discovery link panels you often see on news sites and advertising supported blogs. Essentially, these are the tables of links that…

  • On “Internal Browsers” – And Twitter’s Recent Addition

    A while back Facebook integrated a so-called internal or in-app browser into its mobile apps. The ideas is that when you click to see a website that somebody has shared on Facebook, instead of being taken out of the Facebook environment, the app would display the relevant page within its own browser. The main reason…

  • Amazon’s App Notifications

    As I buy a reasonable amount of stuff from Amazon, I use their mobile app a bit. It’s a relatively convenient way to manage my Amazon transactions. It also usefully sends you updates, using Android’s notifications system, to let you know when your items have been shipped, or if they’re available for collection should you…

  • Why I’m Abandoning Google Inbox

    There was much excitement last autumn when Google launched Inbox, it’s revolutionary new email program. It came with accompanying mobile apps, and the company implored you to fully immerse yourself with it. Like any new product, it required invites to get in and try it. It’s the cool new thing. But having given it a…

  • Why is Discovery So Poor in Amazon and Netflix?

    Over on The Medium is Not Enough, Rob Buckley notes that Amazon has quietly launched a number of new US series onto the service with hardly any publicity. And I find it particularly interesting because I really hadn’t noticed despite spending quite a few hours on Amazon over the weekend. While a lot of this…

  • Mozart in the Jungle

    A mini-review of this new Amazon series, because I think it deserves it! First things first: there’s no doubt that this is a terrible title for a TV series. It’s supposed to shout something like “classical music in New York City” but I’m really not sure it does. I complain when titles are boring, but…