Just wanted to say I'm off to Barcelona so that the last entry on my blog isn't about "The Friend Zone".

Enjoy the British weather :-)

Something I came up with in a conversation earlier this evening...

I have a penthouse in the capital city of Friend-land, where everyone gets along. It's got a fantastic view of the world outside the friend zone, where people are making out with each other and having relationships right in your face. sometimes they broadcast it on TV.

I think about selling the penthouse sometimes, but then I look around and think about what I could be losing, cause on the far side of relationship valley (full of roses and wonderfully starlit evening), I can see the trash-heap of failed romances. 

And the only reason I still think abot it, it because I can also see, in  the far, far distance on top of a hill in the sunny, happy countryside, the house with the nice garden and the kids playing in itm with an old couple sat outside on rocking chairs. And that signifes a relationship gone right.

...It might have been more poetic if I had spell checked it.

"It can be reasonably easy to build an application for the iPhone, but getting it noticed is a different business altogether."

Only one upcoming event and it's online.

Sony says they have suffered many lost sales, suffered damage to their goodwill and other damages to their market.

Henrik Pontén from Svenska Antipiratbyrån (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau) said that their position is very similar to that of the IFPI. Their claim for damages is based on what it would’ve cost for The Pirate Bay to have acquired a global distribution license. This value was doubled to account for an alleged “loss of goodwill”.

Sorry Sony. The loss of goodwill has come from a lot of places, but not through any fault of the Pirate Bay's. It's come from your unauthorised installation of rootkits/spyware onto your customer's PCs. It's come from providing an uninstaller for you spyware which is worse than your spyware. It's come from doing things like suing your own customers for making copies of songs they bought. And further loss will come from suing Pirate Bay. How you could possible think otherwise is beyond me.

What did Captain Picard say when he proposed to his wife?

Engage!

1. Logging company X chops down a tree which is home to an endangered bird.
2. This is not liked, blogosphere goes nuts.
3. Company X blogs "well we had to do it".
4. Equally not liked, more craziness.
5. Company X then opens up a wildlife preserve, apologises and promises not to do it again.
6. Company X is now the most famous logging company in the world, and by now your thoughts on them are neutral - "Yeah, they did a bad thing, but they did a good thing to make up for it". But the important thing for Company X is that they are now much higher profile than before.

It's a dangerous game to play (your "good thing" has to be enough to cover up the "bad thing"), but get it right and there's money to be made. Not all press is good press, but bad press can be turned into a "good thing".

Today, my iPhone died.

No idea why, but whilst developing an application for it using Xcode, I lost the ability to deploy my application to my phone. Xcode told me to try restarting my phone... I did, and my perfectly working phone never managed to make it back to my normal home screen. After staring at the "Emergency calls only" screen for a while, I tried the various things one does at this point.

1. Restore the phone using iTunes - except that iTunes couldn't see the Phone.
2. Remember that Xcode can do restore and use that... the restore fails halfway through "BBand update error".
3. Try restoring with Xcode again. This succeeds, but the iPhone needs to be "activated through iTunes.
4. Open iTunes, which offers to restore the phone from a backup. After trying this, I return to step 1 with a broken phone again.
5. Bang phone against the desk a few times. Didn't help.

Carphone Warehouse (where I got the phone) won't be able to do much more than send the phone to Apple, so I'll probably make a trip to the Apple Store instead. In the meantime, I'm trying to restore the phone from XCode again, and merely activate the phone through iTunes, rather than restoring a backup. Let's see if that works... UPDATE (2 minutes later): No it didn't. Phone is asking for emergency calls only, iTunes says "There is a problem with your iPhone". I'd guessed this.

"Your order is estimated to arrive between Monday, December 8th - Wednesday, December 17th."

I've just been told about a short interview with our CEO about Sccope that's just appeared on YouTube. Let's get it some traffic...

Price Comparison on the Go

She's got a cousin

In fact she's got 'bout a dozen

And she's got one in the oven

But it's nothing to do with me

A new price comparison service, Sccope, has launched that claims to let users find out the lowest prices of products wherever and whenever they are shopping.

Sccope claims to get users the latest and lowest prices on their mobile or online in just a few clicks.

If you are on the high street, you could take advantage of a new bargain-hunting service called Sccope. This searches the cost of a particular item in high-street stores and then tells you where you can find the best price.

You text 62555 with your specific product request to receive the latest prices back to your handset. For example, if you are looking for a Tefal kettle, you text “Tefal kettles” to 62555 and you get a reply with three options: 1. Tefal XH 500104, 2. Tefal Express Diamond Element Stainless and 3. Tefal Quick Cup.

If the Tefal Quick Cup is the one you want to buy, you reply and text 3. It then replies telling you the best price is at John Lewis at £47.95, but Tesco Direct is the most expensive at £55.00. Texts are charged at your normal rate.

"Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment"