Versatile Amphibian

So Arqiva has decided to sell off its popular but clearly unprofitable Seesaw venture. Seesaw, it seems, has struggled in a market in which much of the catch up content that users value most is offered for free on top-drawer technology platforms like the BBC's iPlayer. The latter must rank as one of the BBC's biggest successes - astronomical cost aside, it has created an incredibly rich online TV ecosystem for UK consumers. Comparing it to Hulu, the darling of US TV consumers is like comparing a Ford Model T to a Porsche 911 - Hulu is quaint and functional but hardly a cutting edge product from an experience perspective (and yes, I know, the 911 has evolved since the 60's, which is partly the point ;) ). Where does this leave Seesaw then? It shouldn't be forgotten in all this that Seesaw rose from the considerable ashes of the ill-fated Kangaroo joint venture. It is, therefore, based on the iPlayer technology stack. Considering the technological superiority of the iPl...

Short on updates at the moment because of a project in Norway, so just a quick one about the capabilities of the amazing Google Translate. It's frankly a tribute to the ingenuity of their developers and the community of linguists on the Web who've contributed, that Translate has developed from a fairly rudimentary dictionary to a functional, easy to understand translation tool. Frankly, anything that can make a Norwegian treatise on mobile network architecture readable is an achievement! Hopefully the next step is voice recognition - that really would be something!

On the day that Nokia and MS announced their tie up, HP also released their latest set of Web OS devices. Yes, Web OS. The OS2 Warp of the 2010s. Even the intro video is frankly a bit embarassing - for starters, Todd Bradley appears to be the only person in the audience clapping when he arrives. Anyway, if you haven't got two hours to listen, here's some highlights: The aim Leverage the capabilities of HP to create a step change in mobile computing similar in scale to the introduction of the HP35 calculator (wasn't that the iPhone?) First OS designed from scratch to fully embrace the Internet (and the need for that is...) The market Most people have multiple devices and they consume a lot of web based content No one has developed a solution that works consistently across those devices (Android?) WebOS is a unique technology leveraged across a range of (HP) devices Technology The "Synergy" feature merges information from cloud and brings it onto devices in an inte...