Public Strategist

Mobile has been the imminent future for quite a few years now. Now quite suddenly the mobile web feels very different for three important reasons.

This time next year, it will be difficult to tell the difference between a website and a mobile application. Premasagar Rose, quoting an unnamed participant at Over the Air

It’s the time of year for electoral registration.  For the last couple of years, my council has offered a rather clunky web service, not designed to inspire confidence – indeed barely designed at all – but fully functional nonetheless. This year, I can register by text message – just a case of sending a ten [...]

Back in the big city, life is speeding up again. I don’t have to get into a car to buy a newspaper.   The nearest station is ten minutes’ walk away, not fifteen miles of twisty roads away.  And my downstream speed is 5.7 Mbps, just over a hundred times faster than the 56kbps I could [...]

Rick Segal realised he needed a visa in a hurry: I happened to wander onto the Australian site which talks about all the visa requirements and, golly gee, it’s all electronic.  Click this, fill in that, fork over 20 bucks, and bob’s yer uncle, get the barbee fired up.  Yup. In just under 6 minutes, [...]

the omnipresence of mobiles is an unavoidable feature of daily life, but we have scarcely begun to think through the implications of the transition connected devices are making from being big tethered things to being small wandering things

Having just discovered Directgov’s mobile internet site, I had a look around.  Very sensibly they don’t attempt to replicate the range of content on their main site and have tried to focus on a limited set of content that might be particularly useful to people on the move. But in going down that route, Directgov [...]

We won’t know what all that will be good for until it becomes clearer what it is good for. That’s partly the result of the general chaos affects which afflict weather forecasts, but it is also more specifically a result of our not yet having even thought about how the way the world works is affected by the universal and ubiquitous of powerful but pocket sized network devices.