Today marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of the author and visionary, Douglas Adams. I’ve been reading a little more about him today and stumbled across these thoughts.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I care not to remember my precise age, but I regret that I must now rule out careers in the following areas. Moreover, I am duty bound to be baffled by these until next year at the earliest.

• Smartphones including app development
• LED/LCD TVs, Blu-Rays, Digital Music
• Hybrid cars
• Nano technology
• Large Hadron Colliders
• Britain’s Got Talent / Pop Star nonsense
• Electronic paper
• Wireless power
• Liberal Democrats in government
• Social networks
• My own child (from 2018)

Following weeks of speculation, last week’s Apple event saw the release of a swathe of new, predictable, iPods, an update to the iOSx software for iPhones, and a hardware update to the Apple TV. As an owner of both iPhone and Apple TV, I watched with interest.

Steve Jobs informed a worldwide audience that changes to hardware and software were all customer driven. “We’ve listened” he said and unveiled the new system.

But whoever they listened to were not the right people and they’ve created a device which is curiously impractical. Design lines aside, its rather un Apple.

My current Apple TV gets great use within a suite of home cinema gear. Whilst I have a CD player, I’ve not used it for years preferring the simplicity of playing music digitally through my ATV. All our digital photos are loaded there too playing on our TV as a screensaver. We love it – it means we enjoy our photos rather than have them sit on hard drives elsewhere in the house. We’re subscribers to LoveFilm and owners of some nice AV gear and so we prefer to rent Blu-Rays rather than download via the Apple TV.

But whoever it was that Apple listened to are not using their device like me. Those users seem to be movie consumers for whom music and photos are a peripheral use. The new hardware is perfect as a personal Blockbusters but ill-conceived as vehicle for personal media because Apple have not considered broadband and wifi in real people’s homes.

The new Apple TV will let me play my music and play my songs but without any local storage of these files, insists that do this via streaming. This means that my wifi network needs to be strong and robust throughout my house (it’s three storeys and made of stone and brick, wifi can be dodgy) and also requires me to keep the file source online at the same time. The new device is then worse at doing what I would primarily use it for and, sadly, would use more energy whilst doing it.

And what of the movie-watching crowd that Apple listened to – will they be happy? Cheaper film rental prices will be very welcome, but only those in cities will really be able to take advantage as bandwidth is swallowed when downloading. If you’re in the sticks, I suspect streaming is just impossible.

What I hoped for from the new Apple TV was more storage (maybe a terabyte). I hoped for a better UI, I hoped for connection to Lovefilm, I hoped for apps and I hoped that my iPad would be the new super remote.

So Mr Jobs, it’s a no. I won’t be upgrading to a retrograde piece of kit and I’m disappointed that those early forgiving customers that bought into your hobby are rewarded with functioning but now defunct gear. If you want to listen, I’m ready to talk.

Just over a week ago, on UK launch day, I popped out to the shops on the pretence of looking at the iPad in the flesh, but truth told, unless it was really awful to use, I was going to buy no matter what. I’d done my research, felt I knew all there was to know. The only question a forum really couldn’t answer was “What’s it really like to use?”. 20 minutes in store later and I had an early answer – one week on, I can give a more qualified response.

First, be clear of the iPad’s limitations. These are outlined very well on countless websites but here are my …

5 reasons not to buy an iPad

1. You like flash. If playing Facebook games is your thing, or you use interactive websites, the iPad is not for you.
2. Peripherals. If you need to print, or just have to connect a keyboard, ignore the iPad. Whilst there are rumours of both these features coming soon, there are no timelines and no guarantees.
3. You need Google docs. Just now, you can read but you can’t edit.
4. You need specific software that’s not covered by the 200,000 strong app store. There’s plenty of stuff there but it might be that your “must-have” is not. If so, avoid.
5. The iPad is a great addition to your house, but unless you’ve got iTunes loaded somewhere, or can hitchhike on someone elses, you won’t be able to update, activate or push new content. I don’t think it should be anyone’s primary device.

My 5 reasons to buy:

1. The best surfing experience there is. It’s just so easy to use and the screen is fantastic; websites really do come to life. I’ve found that I consume sites, especially news, when I have previously browsed. Really, it’s fantastic
2. Simple, powerful email client. Ok, Outlook it ain’t but what it does, it does really really well. Throw it horizontal and the neat part-screen scroll comes into it’s own to browse email and read in the instant preview side. Crystal clear, easy to use.
3. Photos look great! The new photo stack feature is also very smart. I remember when we bought the Apple TV and suddenly we took time to look at our photos again. And now, with iPad, we’re doing it again. The photo frame feature is also excellent.
4. Oh, the apps! They were great on the iPhone and they’re brilliant on the iPad, assuming the company have made the appropriate coding efforts. Tweetdeck is superb, we love Epicurious (iPad comes in the kitchen for that) and tvcatchup for iPad is everything the BBC iPlayer should be and isn’t.
5. Videos and music. Apple have completely reworked itunes for iPad and it really shows. As with photos, it enhances serendipity; you’ll discover old favourites you’d forgotten. Video is outstanding.

What is our Apple iPad (notice I’ve said ‘our’? It’s now a firm family favourite shared by everyone). iPad is…

1. An in-car entertainment system for my daughter. Hook it to the headrest and she can watch Nemo for hours.
2. Sofa surfing. Perfect for it with the flash caveats noted above
3. A digital photo frame. Ok, I’d've never bought one but now I’ve got one, I use it!
4. On the go Internet and email. Better than iPhone, more portable and discreet than a laptop. We’re travelling to France on holiday next month and I can see iPad being indispensable.
5. Children’s entertainment and education. My daughter is just over 2 and loves the iPad. If i’m honest, it might be just too easy for her to use – need to find a way to lock the settings app though!

I confess that I love Apple’s gear and we have a houseful of it, but the iPad is a very welcome addition. It has it’s own place, fits the gap neatly between phone and laptop. It has limitations but for my purposes, that’s not an issue.

My one gripe. I need a case (I have the Apple one) to make sure the iPad doesn’t get too beaten up, but it so destroys the aesthetic of this device. Its just so good looking without it!

Intranets are strange beasts. Hidden behind the corporate firewall, they’re very often the practical hub of an organisation serving employee needs. Equally, as we learnt during @thoughtfarmer ‘s presentation, an intranet can be an ignored sink hole of woe. Optimised for Netscape 4.0 indeed …!

I enjoy events such as IBF24 as much for the official comment as the peripheral insight afforded through Twitter. Viewing other company intranets is an opportunity that many corporate intranet folks do not often receive and, frankly, they should grab it with both hands. Grab too some excellent ideas: Who could fail to be impressed with the Ernst and Young people networking graphical tool, or the slightly more achievable British Airways Outlook email signature creator? I’ll be including both in future developments.

A healthy debate was had on the subject of ‘beautiful intranets’, with many intranet examples presented to fuel the conversation. Beauty is a somewhat subjective quality, but with intranets, there must be a practical aspect to the description. An intranet is a place of work; it’s a place of transaction, communication, collaboration and engagement in varying degrees – I think ‘beauty’ is excellence in execution and efficiency in these four platforms. Naturally, there is an aesthetic element to the question, but aesthetic beauty over practical execution does not make for a good intranet.

To paraphrase William Morris, the 19th century British designer and writer “Have nothing in your intranet that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be useful and beautiful”. (As if Morris knew what an intranet was – original quote from The Beauty of Life)

(The award for the most beautiful intranet went to Intermón Oxfam, managed by Julia Serramitjana. In announcing the award, note was made of the clarity of function of the site as well as the use of pastel shades. A little flippantly, I did ask how a company might apply that pastel thinking when their brand is so clearly bright red as mine is. Consensus has it that bright is fine when applied as an accent rather than across a page. We might apply that thinking on the next design change)

I think the joy of events like #ibf24 is that it gets intranet managers out from behind the firewall. It was great virtually meeting so many of you — stay in touch.

I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas last week. I met some great people and was thoroughly impressed with the innovation from Microsoft and from their clients alike.

On the plus side

• Great new functionality in SharePoint 2010 which I’m going to enjoy bringing to the company. Especially the social computing aspects
• Top innovation from companies, particular Electronic Arts (EA) and Accenture.
• Great people
• Organisation at the Mandalay. I think that team had it really organised. Whilst some would have seen the mealtimes as chaotic (and on day 1 it certainly was), I think they did a sterling job
• Kirk Patrick, Mandalay Bay staff. Despite Pepsi being everywhere, he was unphased by my request for a range of Coke products to be delivered within the hour to our conference room. There in 10. Brilliant.

Downsides

• Las Vegas. If you’re not a gambling person like me, it’s a thoroughly depressing town and if you are a gambler, there’s a chance you were more depressed about it than me. One colleague lost over $1000 – it’s hard to be happy for him
• Coffee. Some are addicted to caffeine. Some, like me, were 8 hours out of their timezone and needed the fix to get ‘em through. There were water stations galore, more food than needed so the lack of coffee stations seemed an oversight. (Edit – I think they noticed by Thursday judging by the coffee points near registration)
• SharePoint accessibility coding. I recognise the advances they’ve made but this is a very complex area. The recognition of standards is a genuinely positive step, but when each country appears to have their own, it seems unlikely that a single MS standard will work for all geographies. You know, great for the US, but probably not so good for the rest of the world.

I really hope that anyone who came to see me speak last Wednesday enjoyed the session and has been generous in their feedback. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions about our deployment if you have them.

I also hope that next year, SPC10 is not in Las Vegas. Seattle maybe, New York even. Either way, look forward to it.

Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.

Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.

The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).

A few facts to share:

• Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
• New menus to accommodate HR content
• 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
• 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
• New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
• Integrated employee benefits functions
• Integrated job search functions
• New “workbench” page
• Enhanced employee profile page

This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.

Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback

I’ve been using Twitter for over a year, but only actively for the last month or so. One thing I did recently was to have iTunes twitter my listening habits to my account which appears to have piqued some collective interest judging by the number of messages I get about it. Let me show you how.

To do this you will need: iTunes, a last.fm account with scrobbling, a Twitter account (obviously!) and an OpenID account such as Google Mail.

1. Go to last.fm and set up a new account if you don’t have one. This is all free and brilliant — frankly, you need one anyway! Download the last.fm software — this will ‘listen’ to whatever you play on iTunes and scrobble it to the last.fm website.
2. Next up, log in to twitterfeed.com using your OpenID. It’s likely that you already have a suitable ID for this site (complete list here). Once logged in, choose Go to my feeds or create a new one. Choose to create a new feed.
3. Final Step! On the form, choose ‘twitter’ from the first dropdown list and enter your twitter details — then ask it to authenticate it. In the RSS feed URL field, enter

   feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/XXXX/recenttracks.rss

   where XXXX is your last.fm username. You can change how often you want the feed to appear on twitter on this page too. Don’t do it too often or you’ll upset your followers — once every 2 hours or so seems ok. In the ‘prefix each tweet with’, you might like to enter ‘is listening to ‘ to give your new tweet some context. Then hit the create button.

That’s it, you’re done. Your iTunes listening habits will now appear on twitter and your followers can see what you’re listening too. Great way to get more followers too — it’s remarkable how often I get comments and new followers based on this feed.

Once you’re comfortable with this process, try adding a flickr feed or a feed from your blog.

Watermark Project projection on Bristol building

(Note too my choice of words: Global Warming it might be for some, but others may see temperatures fall and here in Britain, it’s somewhat of an unknown which way it could fall).

So what if the ice melts eh? A few penguins cannot reproduce due to the lack of sea ice, hardly the end of the world. The reality for many of our cities is somewhat more striking in truth.

For millennia, we have been settling near seas and rivers due to the fertility of the soils, the wide availability of food and, in more recent centuries, due to the trading opportunities afforded. As a result, 1 in 10 of the world’s population lives within 30feet of sea level, two-thirds of us live within 100km of the coast.

Consider then these images of projections on buildings in my home town. Parochial certainly, but never the less striking.

Read more at watermarksproject.org

In hindsight, all the clues were there but I wonder how many of us would have seen the investment opportunity suggested in this early review of the Google search engine. All said, it’s hard to imagine that even Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin could imagine how their project might develop.

The article makes note of the fact that even then, Google had ambition. In 1998, they already had indexed 25million pages and were soon to up that to a massive 100million — compared to today’s 8-10 billion.

The interface came in for some criticism noting that it was in need of a facelift. Again, hindsight tells us that the simple, clean, white-focused homepage set the benchmark in usability. It’s said that the interface was so simple because Page and Brin never got round to working on it and the beta design just stuck. Tempting to believe that.

“Will Google go commercial” the founders were asked, “we’ve no objections” the future multi-billionaires responded. $1000 invested in the fledgling company back in 1998 would now be worth $250million.

Missed opportunity.

After 10 years of planning, 3 years of building and countless months of expectation, they opened the Apple store today in my home town, just for me.

Surrounding my new Apple Store at Cabot Circus, the developers have helpfully built over a 100 new stores to keep other people entertained, such as Harvey Nichols, House of Fraser and other usual suspects. Honestly, they’ve done a wonderful job — it actually feels like a place I would tolerate shopping in.

But the new Church of Saint Steve Jobs is a lovely addition to my city and one that I and my bank balance may regret. Despite my not needing anything, I lust over small shiny Appley objects and I fear that shop is going to see a good few of my hard earned pounds over the next few years.

Oh dear.

[The image is of one of the 1000 t-shirts that the store gave away today. I didn't try and get there since it was during work hours and the crowds would have been stupid. When I go, I need peaceful solitude to saviour the shiney]