Monday, July 30, 2007

Useful sites for those considering buying a property in the UK


Property Snake shows how much a property's asking price has dropped in your area.

House Price Crash has been warning of an impeding crash for a while (called a "slowdown" or "soft landing" by property agents, surveyors, lenders and builders). I reproduced it above as it is such a powerful message.





Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Introducing Yugma

Yugma does what WebEx do but is entirely browser based, and cost a fraction of the price (it's free for all basic collaboration services including web conferencing). I am using ioften with colleagues from the US and I am impressed by its simplicity of use and powerful features.

Paris to offer free Wi-Fi

105 Parisian locations will be covered by free Wi-Fi. They include libraries, parks, public places and so on. Would Mr. Livingstone consider a similar initiative? How about getting corporate sponsors to fund it?

Article in French

Saturday, July 14, 2007

London underground dinner party

Hats off. And as one of the commenters accurately noted: " I've never seen Londoners smile on a tube before".

Thursday, July 12, 2007

European Internet users spend more time online than watching TV or reading newspapers

European internet users spend 14.3 hours a week online, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines, the research group said. 36% of people who go online said they spent less time looking at the television as a result.

BBC News

Friday, July 06, 2007

Will Facebook kill Linked-In?

my network is bigger than yours” attitude. By contrast Facebook users are more laid-back and you get to know more personal stuff about them.

New UK Fiat website

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Preserving our collective memory in the digital age

The BBC is running a warning from the Chief executive of the UK National Archives: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."

Think about it, we can still read 5,000 years old Egyptian hieroglyphs or medieval manuscripts but we can't access a file on a floppy disk, read a Betamax tape or a Philips CD-I... There is a danger of loosing our collective memory because we record it on highly perishable media. And the pace of change drives the cost of re-recording it again and again for national archives, who are often poorly funded.

I reckon that in 10 years time, it will be fashionable to handwrite letters again, just because it involves efforts and makes the recipient feel special. And your letter will be preserved for hundred years for posterity, unlike that "reply all" email.

BBC article

Funny Hansaplast condom ad