Developing Open Transport isn't about the the technology

I have been pretty involved in the creation of the Open Transport Initiative. A project, along with some very clever folk in the transport industry, to create a new interoperability open standard for transport / mobility accounts.

It has been personally rewarding (so far) and on 14 October we launched a near-finalised version of the customer account specification for peer review & feedback.

Several people have commented that this is a pretty significant technology, which (assuming it is adopted across the transport industry) could provide a similar level of integration and openness as Open Banking has provided to the Financial Services industry.

But the reason for creating this Open Standard and giving it away (eventually) isn't to show how technically proficient I and those around me are. It is to meet a growing need that has been identified... that a customer's transport data such as: purchases, usage and concessions is locked away in an account for each mode of transport.

Steve Jobs once famously remarked 'You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.' and this is what we have done. 

Apple claims formula leads to signal strength issues

It is common knowledge by now that if you grip the new iPhone in such a way that your hand covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band there is a decrease in the signal strength of the device.

Rumours are still making the rounds that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO told someone complaining about this issue not to hold it in this way... but these are completely denied by the Cupertino-based company.

However in a press release today from Apple, they have broken their silence and claimed

"We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both
simple and surprising."

"Its seems that the formula used to calculate how many signal strength bars are displayed is wrong"

Therefore the phone, rather than showing the users they are in a low signal areas, is incorrectly showing too many bars. So when users touch the phone in the lower left corner and get the resulting drop in signal...

"Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."

So there you have it... its not Apple's fault this happens... you're in the wrong signal area.

Oh, and to solve the problem they will be releasing a fix for this problem soon, that also makes the smaller bars bigger.... so if you leave your glasses on your head whilst losing your signal, you can still see what a poor signal you are getting!

Another giant leap for Apple with the iPhone?

With the launch of yet another device this year (the iPhone 4G, of course) Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs has once again brought the media spotlight back to advanced smart phone market and their applications - rather than the tablet format that the iPad created so much hype about earlier in 2010.

Jobs has described the device as "the biggest leap since the original iPhone"... But is it?

Sure, the original iPhone was a jump from the rungs of the traditional lunar capsule of Personal Computing and MP3 players that was Apple's existing domain... but it was hardly the huge step that he is now claiming it was. Others were already in the market with similar and comparably better or higher specification mobile phones.

The giant leap was in the creation of the App Store, the method of distributing small programmes that further enhanced the functionality of the device. This led to a micro-industry of bedroom developers building things they wanted or needed ... then Apple cleverly allowed them to give away or sell their work (provided they gave Apple a cut of the profits).

Lets just be careful . Don't let 'The Book Of Jobs' be the only historical document we refer to in the future.... or we may find that he claims he was first to walk on the moon (or water) as well !

Note: If you are passing an O2 store in London first thing tomorrow morning, you may see me queuing outside for my 4G iPhone

Flash... ahhhhh

OK, it was just a very flimsy excuse to use a Queen-orientated blog heading, but I'm going to use it anyway.

It's also not a sin to pay homage to a copywrited document or published work, despite what music companies would like. It also pales into insignificance when compared to what Mr Steve Jobs said last week to the Wall Street Journal about Adobe's flagship interaactive software... Flash (see there was a relevance in the headline somewhere).

Apparently everyone's favourite poloneck wearer took time while at the WSJ to accuse Flash of being a "CPU hog," having "security holes" and a dying technology. Even better he claimed that the task of moving from Flash (perhaps to a much more iPad-friendly HTML5) would be 'trivial'.

There's currently no news on whether the creative and technical folks over that 'The Journal' have stopped laughing yet.....

More details via ValleyWag:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5474900/what-steve-jobs-said-during-his-wall-street-journal-ipad-demo

Fake blogs

Blogs written pretenting to be someone working for a company in order to satirise them are both funny to the reader and potentially damaging to the brand.

The secret diary of Steve Jobs
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/
This quite clearly is not the blog of the Apple CEO and is very tongue-in-cheek

However, some blogs tread that fine line between being either an absolutely awful company blog or a great parody.
For example, I'll leave you to decide if this really is the official American Airlines blog or not:
http://aaconversation.blogspot.com/

Notes:
For more funny fake blogs, visit Newsgroper:
http://www.newsgroper.com/
This site has lots of postings from 'supposedly' real bloggers (including Al Gore & Briney Spears)

Also take a look at my previous posting about other fake UGC content.