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It’s been coming for some time now but Microsoft finally pulled the plug on its long-running webmail service, Hotmail, a couple of weeks ago – migrating all current users to the new Outlook service. There was little warning in terms of a prominent notice within the interface (instead the only people who knew exactly when it was coming did so because they …

Small businesses often face a tricky decision when it comes to cloud storage. Not being big enough to build and run their own custom cloud solutions, services like Dropbox and Sugarsync look very attractive as tools for backing up data and making it accessible and shareable across a potentially mobile and/or disparate workforce. Best of all these services are free… …

For companies whose main customer interactions take place online it can sometimes be tricky to identify things which don’t work quite so well. While lots of analytics are increasingly available, the reality is that these require careful interpretation in order to work out which areas of a website are doing their job properly – and which ones aren’t. With this …

One of my friends has recently become a full time games designer so I’ve been able to have a few interesting chats with him about various video game related topics – including designing for smartphones. One of the things we’ve spent a while discussing is that one of the most interesting aspects of smartphone games design – from a history …

Here are two current problems in the field of social media: Firstly, a tricky issue for businesses wanting to make use of social media has always been the difficulty in precisely quantifying the benefits. The main reason for this is that social media has been used mainly in a marketing capacity and, although various analytics are available, it is nonetheless …

With last week’s release of Nintendo’s long-awaited follow-up to the Wii console – the Wii U – it’s a good time to discuss innovation in the world of console design. In particular I’d like to focus on something which made the original Wii such a hit – its original hardware interfacing (i.e. controller) – which is something Nintendo have tried …

The past couple of years haven’t been kind on RIM, the makers of Blackberry smartphones, with nosediving market-share reducing what was once a market-leader to a floundering minnow uncertain where to head next. It’s all Apple’s fault – their vision of touchscreen phones has taken over the market to the extent that very few devices now still feature a physical …

Many Facebook users were today surprised to log-in and discover that their groups membership had suddenly ballooned to include both groups they’d left a long time ago – and groups they’d never joined. I was one of the many who then proceeded to manually remove each one by clicking ‘leave group’ – annoying, but hardly a disaster. Just another momentary …

Cinema had The Blair Witch Project – an ultra low-budget title, made with practically nothing, that out-grossed most of Hollywood’s output in 1999. Yes, it was supported by extremely clever marketing – but the bottom line is that it proved that you could still have a monster hit with something that cost literally 0.01% of your average Hollywood budget. It …

The past week has seen yet another bogus Facebook wall post go viral as users were fooled into thinking they could re-assert control over their data by simply copy-and-pasting the post as a status update. Specifically, the focus was on the issue of who owns the copyright for the content of users’ status updates, comments and so on. Users re-posting …