Straight To The Point: Developments in local media and new location based services.
  • My Flickr RSS feed My Flickr RSS

Friday, July 13, 2007

Me and my Nokia N95

As I'm not generally known as a gadget-geek-freak it's something of a surprise to find myself grappling with the new Nokia N95.

Too much has already been written about it on the web for me to bother repeating all those tales of woe on short battery life, patchy GPS receivers and continual N95/iPhone debates.

In fact, there's something about these 'problems' that I find especially enjoyable - I think it's the idea of using a piece of technology that feels so new, so un-tested in many ways, and right on the edge of technological convergence.

If you haven't got one yet (and there are already a surprising number of people that do have one) then I urge you to do so, and to play with it and test it and, frankly, just mess around with it and see what happens - you might just have some fun!

Labels: ,

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Own the club, pick the team, upset the fans.

Myfootballclub.com is one of those perfectly simple yet so fabulously interesting ideas that you just can't understand why you didn't think of it yourself.

50,000 people club together, put in a few quid, buy the controlling interest in a football club, then make joint, democratic decisions on how the team is run.

To quote:

50,000 MyFootballClub members are about to bid for an English football club. They will make history together, voting on team selection and on which players to buy and sell.

Members will attempt to guide the club up the leagues, sharing equal ownership and control. Just like a football management game – but for real.

At the time of writing, 42,592 people had signed up, including me. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that.

Personally I have a few doubts. What kind of person will want to be head coach, with decisions controlled by 50,000 clicks of a mouse from internet geeks across the world? How sensible are these 50,000 going to be at allocating club funds? How happy are the 50,000 individuals going to be when all of their decisions are still in the minority and the team is not playing the formation or tactics they are voting for?

But, more importantly, what if they buy my home town club Exeter City? Would I really want that to happen to my team? It looks like it is going to happen somewhere.

Still, like I said, in for a penny and all that.... I'm quite looking forward to being one of those people watching how this progresses from the inside.

Labels: