adambowie.com

Category: Internet

  • The Price of Rental

    I missed Guardians of the Galaxy in cinemas earlier this year. But it was well reviewed, and I did plan to catch it. The good news is that it came out on “home video” recently. So I could either buy it on DVD or BluRay, or watch it in download/streaming. If I choose to rent…

  • Twitter is Searchable: My Early Timeline

    Twitter has finally built a full search engine for its archived Tweets. That’s important because it has been incredibly hard in the past to find specific Tweets. I’m on Twitter of course, and have been since sometime in December 2006. But this search engine fills in a few blanks. My first Tweet was not the…

  • Podcast Numbers – Does Serial Tell Us Anything?

    In a world where there are so many metrics available, there’s often a curious shortage of figures in some parts of the tech industry where you’d like there to be. Amazon won’t tell you how many Kindles its sold. Netflix won’t say how many episodes of House of Cards it has streamed. And so on.…

  • Inbox from Google – Quick Thoughts

    I’ve been playing around with Google’s new email solution – Inbox – for a few days now. As is usual with these things, it’s invitation only at the moment (and no, I don’t have any invites right now). But registering directly with Google doesn’t seem to take too long. But what do I think of…

  • Putting YouTube and Twitter Into Perspective

    Recently Enders Analysis released a report detailing why television advertising isn’t likely to be losing out to the internet in the near term. Enders believes that television will remain the key advertising medium for the foreseeable future. Part of that reason is that its scale is unmatched. Ray Snoddy, on Mediatel, expanded a little and…

  • Betas

    One of the exciting things you can do in our digital world is become a beta tester. Lots of companies and organisations let you test out their new upgrades ahead of rolling them out to the population. It’s quite good fun if you like that sort of thing. They let you see features ahead of…

  • Retargeting – Mostly a Waste of Money

    Even though I live and breathe the internet, I only recently learnt what “retargeter” or “retargeting” companies are, and what it actually is that they do. You’ll know it even if you hadn’t heard the term either. You know that thing you were thinking of buying? Well perhaps you looked at on Amazon/John Lewis/Asos/wherever. But…

  • Big Data Really Works

    Two great examples! Despite a wealth of left-leaning and liberal titles bought from Amazon over the years, yesterday they sent me this special one day deal: More on the money was the fact that I like a bit of folk music. So a targeted Amazon folk email seems sensible, especially as it highlights the brand…

  • Podcasting – What Next?

    Tomorrow evening, there’s a Radio Academy event taking place in London looking at podcasting. As I’ve written previously, you always feel that podcasting is the perennial bridesmaid and never the bride in the digital media, and digital audio world. I suppose I’ve been thinking a little more about it recently because one of my favourite…

  • Future Thinking and Unthinking

    A couple of big US tech firms made some big announcements today. Amazon will get the lion’s share of attention for its new Amazon Fire Phone. Essentially it’s a mini version of their Kindle Fire, using their forked version of Android, but with a phone. The big excitement is that it’s 3D. Well all phones…

  • Why I’m Not Installing Facebook Messenger

    Facebook and I have an interesting relationship. I’ve been on it quite some time, and have lots of “friends” (more accurately, friends and acquaintances). However, I do find it useful for keeping up with what this extended group are up to. And if you’re organising a social event, then it’s a useful resource to help…

  • 25 Years of the World Wide Web

    We all know it’s 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web on us. Although a worryingly large number of people seem to think that it’s 25 years of the internet that we’re celebrating today. As any fool knows, the internet pre-dated the web by many years, and to think otherwise is to…

  • Battle of the Streaming Services

    This morning, Amazon UK announced a shake-up of its streaming offering, hitherto called LoveFilm. From next week, the service gets rebranded as Amazon “Prime Instant Video”, but perhaps more importantly, it gets rolled into the regular Amazon Prime offering. So far, so good, unless you were attached to the LoveFilm name. However there are price…