In April I introduced MyPhysioLink – the physiotherapy start-up that I and my co-founder, Cris Costa, have been working on. With the beta launch of the service imminent, we looked long and hard at the name and decided it wasn’t good enough.
So we are now Therapy-Smarter.com. Visit our website to see what we’re up to, and for the latest news on our progress. Physiotherapists can sign up for a free trial.
Raoul Vaneigem said;
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
But he wrote this before the internet existed. Today, we might add ;
… and is only discoverable by those with excellent search skills and a willingness to plough through endless irrelevance.
Finding information that meets your needs, is written in a language you understand, on the basis of assumed knowledge that you already possess is not at all easy – despite the cornucopia that is the internet. Or is it, because of the cornucopia…?
The problem applies in reverse for producers of content. How will your (my!) little gem of insight ever be seen by more than a few?
Continue reading “Discoverability, the semantic web and the power of patterns”
I have an FP1 Fairphone. Not the greatest ‘phone ever, but the outcome of an amazing project started by a small group of Dutch activists to develop and sell a smartphone with the best possible ethical and environmental credentials (avoiding conflict minerals, paying attention to worker’s conditions, supporting repairs and recycling, amid other concerns). The FP1 was fairly compromised, but established the outfit, and sold 60,000.
The FP2 is a significant advance, independently verified as the most ethical smartphone available. Most importantly for me, it is based on a chipset which is ‘open’ enough that alternative OS development is practical ( not the case for the FP1). This means that the ‘phone will likely have a longer practical life, with updates potentially available from a variety of sources.
Fairphone understand and support this, and the impulse to write this post is the announcement that Fairphone are going to open the Fairphone OS (an android fork) for community contributions, releasing a set of software tools to support this.
I haven’t got an FP2 yet (not buying a new ‘phone until you really, really need one is the sustainable way, folks, frustrating though it might be). So I’m hoping that, by the time I do, there will be a strong community behind Fairphone, giving me more and better options for using the hardware – which should itself be upgradeable, thanks to modular design.
Interested in Fairphone? Look here. For Computing magazine’s pre-production review, look here.
“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray
Inspiring idea … but what does a better nation look like? How does it work?
Read this.
In my post TechnoLiberation a few weeks ago, I rather vaguely proposed that the new political/economic paradigm would come up from underneath, that it would be predicated on enormous numbers of people using information technology to create new forms of interaction that worked for humans, that superseded the current models, rather than did battle with them.
Paul Mason’s new book, for which the article is a pre-publication taster menu, makes a much stronger, more detailed, and compelling case that the beginnings of this transformation are under way already – that the economics of information underpin all sorts of human initiatives, on a wide number of fronts, that offer tentative blueprints for ‘a better nation’ in the making.
A better nation – and one which people in technology can easily imagine that they are working in the early days of.
Although we all know about Moore’s Law, and about the all-but-absurd increase in computing power at ever lower prices that its effects have given rise to, it is still worth reading this short article/graphic at IEEE.org.
Sample boggling sentence:
More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011.
Blogger Brian Posey, discussing Microsoft’s ‘Continuum’ concept, has this;
In another demo, someone connected their Windows Phone to a large screen and to a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Not only did Office expand to accommodate the larger screen size, but the experience was identical to that of working on a PC. The presenter even said that with some of the higher-end phone models it will be possible to use your phone as a phone and a “PC” at the same time. It would be possible, for example, to work on a spreadsheet on the big screen while talking on the phone, playing a game or watching a video on the phone’s built-in display.
Using the phone as a PC seemed like a completely seamless experience. The only indication that the presenter was not using a PC was the fact that there was no desktop mode.
This is convergence, and I predict (with my usual complete lack of originality) that it will produce a major upheaval, and the final nail in the coffin of the traditional PC as a consumer device. I’ve been going on about it for ages, but not here so far.
The logic is simple. If you have, always with you, a powerful-enough computer that has access to all the software and data you need, then why would you ever bother to use a different device? Why would you spend out on another powerful computer, with different software, that is effectively immobile – another device that condemns you to continually switching interfaces, worrying about synchronisation, using different networks, different UI paradigms. Seriously, why?
Well, for quite a number of very good reasons, you are no doubt thinking – but the thing is, all of those reasons are melting away, and melting fast…
Continue reading “Convergence is coming like a train on rails…”
I’ve been thinking about this, off-and-on, over the last few weeks, ever since I had a conversation with a chap hoping to build up a large database of Type 2 diabetes related stats, analysis of which would allow his firm to develop a tool to help sufferers self-manage their own care.
In the context of our own interest in getting hold of large amounts of data from wearable devices with movement information related to exercises, I began to think about the differences, wondering what they might suggest.
Continue reading “Wearable data business models re-imagined”
Tech AND Liberation?! I just had to attend. To find myself successively disappointed and then engaged.
I’ve just read about, then immediately joined, then immediately fallen in love with… Fleep.
In common with many others, I have hated email for years; such a clunky old tool, used, because of its ubiquity and peerless network advantage, for everything – even though 90% of the use cases are horribly inappropriate (can you imagine the nightmares engendered by a 4 year old ‘reply all’ email used for arranging an annual street party?).
I have used many other things – google groups, wikis, chat, groupware, application-specific commenting tools – some of which were rather better, some of which were rather worse than email – but each of them not email, and sometimes that was good enough.
Continue reading “Fleep is the word … it’s got groove, it’s got meaning…”
After being a little coy about what I’m actually working on, it seems that it is time to come clean.
It’s been a slow-moving project, partly as I’m still having to earn a living doing architecture, and partly because my co-founder is even busier. But we’re about to step up a gear, both in time commitment and with an upcoming test-marketing launch, and so the time has come to make it public.
My co-founder is a physiotherapist. We’ve known each other for ages, but it wasn’t until I had an episode of frozen shoulder that I understood a/ how good a physio he is, b/ how important physiotherapy is, and c/ how ante-diluvian the systems around physiotherapy are.
Digital Anthropology 