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One of the blogs I regularly read is Graham Jones: Internet Psychologist. I happened to stumble across Graham’s writing after he wrote about a bad experience he’d had with PlusNet in 2006.

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I’ve just spent the last hour or so going through my last-minute check-list of things to sort out before I fly to India on Friday to kick-off some new projects with our Software Development teams over there.

One of the things on my list was “Investigate cost effective WiFi service at Heathrow and Doha Airports”. As I spend a lot of time travelling on trains and in airports, I often need access to the Internet from my laptop (when Internet access on my phone isn’t quite enough). The usual answer to this is to pay £5 a go for an hour’s worth of WiFi Hotspot access on BT Openzone (using my PlusNet WiFi minutes), T-Mobile or The Cloud or whatever else is in range; hardly a cost effective way of doing things.

My investigation lead me to some interesting software that I can install on my phone that will turn my phone into a WiFi hotspot. I can then connect to this hotspot with my laptop and surf away.

The good news? The software is free and I don’t pay for data usage on my phone.

For those people that are interested in this sort of thing:
• The software is called Joiku
• My laptop is a very small Sony Vaio; Great for taking on the plane.
• My phone is a Nokia N95 8GB

There are a few limitations, mainly that the Joiku software only works with HTTP and HTTPS traffic, so if I want Instant Messaging access I need to use Fring on my phone or a browser Instant Messaging interface such as Meebo, but I can live with that.

If anyone else has any recommendations that can beat this then I’d be very pleased to hear from you. I’ll report back with my findings as to how well (or otherwise) this goes…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

Twitter: MattGrest

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The other day I was playing around with Huddle, a web-based project management and collaboration environment. A friend of mine who works at Huddle asked me what I thought. Their definition of what Huddle is is probably better than mine:

“Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles.”

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People are split firmly into two camps with regards to their view of the OSX Operating system. There are those that love it and those that haven’t tried it yet.

Up until now OSX has been strictly “for Macs only” (aside from hacking around getting an illegally modified version installed on a PC), but Psystar, a Miami company, announced this week of the launch of the £200 “Open PC” that is capable of running an unmodified Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

When you compare the configuration of the OpenPC with that of a Mac Mini you find that “the Mac Mini costs 150% of the price of the OpenPC while offering poorer performance, smaller storage space, and RAM”.

Apple ran an authorized Mac clone program for a stint of about two years in the mid-to-late 90’s, but upon Steve Jobs’ return to the business this was ceased.

Following the announcement by Psystar earlier this week, their website crashed under the load. The company said its web traffic peaked at over 30,000 hits per second on Monday, causing an outage; so there’s an undoubted demand for what they are offering.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the Apple legal team respond…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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Every day in the PlusNet office somebody will post a “Have you seen this great website?” forum post, a “How cool is this?” message will go around or you’ll see a Twit from a friend claiming that this new site makes the whole Internet as we knew it redundant. I’m sure you’ve been there yourself. Yes, there are a million and one interesting/cool/impressive things floating around on the Internet, but how many of these sites do you personally need?

Do you have particular web-sites and web-tools that are so useful that they have actually become an integral part of your life, or as cool as something may be, is it really just time-wasting flotsam?

Personally, I really couldn’t do without the trusty old HSBC Internet banking website. I know it hasn’t really been upgraded for 6 or 7 years, but who cares? It tells me how much money I have (or otherwise) and I can pay my credit card bill without having to go through the pain of an automated phone system or posting a cheque in the mail.

I find that iGoogle is extremely useful; it aggregates the RSS feeds from all the news sites that I read, and provides me with rudimentary ToDo List functionality and access to all my bookmarks, on whichever of the 3 devices I access the web on.

Apart from that, what else is there that I really need? Yes, Facebook is useful when planning my social life and seeing what my friends are up to, Flickr is useful for sharing my photos with family and friends (and also a useful backup of many years worth of photos), and apart from that, cool does not seem to equal necessary. Twitter, Plaxo and Pownce don’t really do anything for me, do they you?

Google Grand Central may be of use when they open up the service to the UK, but for now I’ll stick with Skype on my laptop and Fring on my phone.

I don’t really watch a lot of TV due to being too busy with other things, so BBC iPlayer isn’t something that I need. I’ll wait for the day when TV stations decide to provide 1 minute summaries of their programming in the style of ZeroPunctuation - much more efficient…

So, I suppose that all sounds a bit like Mr Grumpy, but if I don’t need something then I’m not going to waste my time on it.

How about you the PlusNet Community Site reader, what web-sites and web-tool do you really rely on as part of your life?

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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So, a lot of my colleagues at PlusNet know that I like a jolly good knees-up, the occasional beer (ahem) and talking about technology, especially where it can enhance my life and work. The chance to combine all three is usually an opportunity not to be missed, and one such opportunity came up last Wednesday at Leeds GeekUp. More…

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I blogged last year about the software development teams that we have set up in India so I thought that now was a good opportunity to bring everyone up to date with the progress we have made and of our future plans.

In my previous post I didn’t give the real big picture around why we are diversifying the physical locations of our software development team, so grab a coffee and read on…

PlusNet’s internal Operating System (known as Workplace) is an extremely large and complicated software system that has been built-up over the previous 9 years. Way back in 1999, PlusNet’s software development team consisted of myself and 3 other guys, sat round a single desk at Victoria Quays, Sheffield. The live web-servers were located under the desk, so quite often you’d get up to make a cup of tea, kick the power cable out and the website would go down for a few minutes while we waited for the server to reboot. This is how it was back then; a small group of people around the business worked round the clock, 7 days a week to build up the business, build the system, support the customers, fight the fires and put in place automated software systems that enabled our customers to “self serve” instead of having to call and speak to our customer support centre. More…

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In my role as Product Development Manager at PlusNet, I see lots of products that the seller would have us believe will be the ‘next big thing’™.

It’s rare that I agree. Few new technologies stand out as being anything life changing, and often I have to point out to manufacturers how notoriously difficult UK consumers are to please. Just because someone has sold X million units in Japan or the States it’s no indication that a product will fly in the UK.

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Last week we had 2 interesting stories hit, both concerning the severing of undersea cables that carry global communications traffic. More…

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It wasn’t so long ago that Encyclopedia Britannica was the definitive source for information. Then came along the computer and Microsoft’s Encarta DVD version of the world. It had a big impact on Britannica’s business model and shrank the market considerably (I mean who would pay hundreds of pounds for the books when they could get a DVD for less than £30).

Then came Wikipedia. Wikipedia offered a free service with content written by the public and this caused major disruption again.

I dont have the detailed statistics but Wikipedia currently gets around 450 times the traffic as Encyclopedia Britannica.

So you would think that would be the end of it. I mean how can you compete with free?

Over the weekend Google announced GPedia. Their version of the Wikipedia, but this time they will pay contributors based on the advertising revenue generated on the pages holding their content. So again, Google tips the market dynamics on its head.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - and whether GPedia becomes as popular as Wikipedia, but when you own the search engine of choice and you can change the algorithms which point people to relevant sites it does make an interesting proposition.

What do you think of this proposal?

Dean

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