Month: February 2011

Categories
Mobile

So farewell to the cheesy phone OS

The not unexpected news that Nokia have finally given up on it’s Symbian mobile phone operating system is still sad news. Symbian owes its existence to the plucky (yes I know a cliche) British firm of Psion, original develops of computer games for Sinclair and developers of the first generation of PDAs. Needing a relatively powerful operating system which allowed multi-taking, could drive a simple graphic user interface with low power consumption, Psion developed EPOC the  “Electronic Piece Of Cheese”.

EPOC was developed over ten years from the late 1980’s powering such iconic devices at least for us Brits as the Psion Series 3 PDA. EPOC had developed into a full 32bit operating system by 1997, and was renamed Symbian and in 1998 Psion itself became part of Symbian a joint venture with the major mobile phone manufacturers of the time; Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia with the aim of producing software to run mobile phones.

And the rest is history.. Symbian increasing lead by Nokia as the other phone manufactures dropped out became increasing complex both from a developer perspective but more importantly from a user perspective.. a point driven home when the iPhone hit the market.

So we come to last weeks burning platform memo, and the jump to Microsoft, a sad end to another British innovation that lost it’s way ?

Incidentally if I was in charge of a burning oil platform and had to command my crew to jump into the dark waters below, I’m not sure if would be very wise to direct everybody to get on just one of the lifeboats in the water, and really dangerous to all get on the smallest.. Still what do I know about maritime safety !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Data Policy Google Maps Thoughts

Evening all, what going on with these crime maps then…

So initially the  moral of this story seems to be, if you are launching a Government website across the mass media, make sure you do the load testing with 100x what you expect.

The real issue is that despite having best intentions and a commitment to transparency, it’s very easy to confuse, mislead and lose credibility with poor crime mapping.

One of the  key positives of UK police website is the availability of the data behind the site which can been downloaded or accessed via a REST based API, secondly and something which few commentators have mentioned a link to local police teams who are ultimately responsible for reducing crime at the local level. Of course one years aggregated data is of little value here, allowing only relative comparisons between locations to be made, the real value will come in the future years when trends are identifiable and hopefully may be linked to local policing initiatives.

Many have commented however on issues with the mapping where the site designers have tried to offer more detail than the previous ward level statistics by moving to reporting the actual location of crimes, as commonly found in American crime maps.

While this is something I personally think should be made available, the map is not actually shown the real locations.

Many crimes are not accurately located in the first place, and because of privacy concerns expressed by the Information Commissioners’ Office some locations have been modified, moved or aggregated so that the points displayed on the map do not actually represent the actual location of the crimes but are indicative of the location.  I think it’s clear that perhaps an American style crime map was intended but what have ended up with is an uncomfortable and misleading compromise.

The fact that the points don’t actually represent the locations of crimes is at one level understandable, but to most people a point on the map represents the location of something, so much of the uproar in the press calling into question the accuracy of the maps can be understood.

However because the underlying data is available, budding data visualisation experts and cartographers can get to work and attempt to produce maps and other visualisations that perhaps better represent the data, already Jonathan Raper’s team at placr have come up with this different visualisation, using a multiresolution grid rather than the less obvious neighbour/street locations.

I hope the Home Office is not put off by the criticism of this first attempt, if Government is really to be more open and make use of the web in tackling complex issues such a crime and the local perception of crime, they must follow the web philosophy of constant iteration and development.

So they must dust themselves down, listen to the criticism, and make the next version better; and the following version even better… but quickly !

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
Mobile Thoughts

The antidote to smartphones ?

You have to appreciate the minimalist design aesthetic of this phone from Amsterdam based  designer John Doe, but I’m not sure I could really love a phone that only made and received calls, no SMS, email, camera or heaven forbid Location Based Services !!

I tried to use an old Ericsson T28 as my “home” mobile for a while, because I thought it was cool and had a certain retro chic about it… but I missed email, maps, surfing the web too much.

Once you have gone smartphone, there is no going back..

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)