These my micropostings and bookmarks – August 4th through August 25th:

• Data Based : The Relational Model turns 40 –
• Walmart.com – see it in 3-D –
• Barclays, Orange Partner on Mobile Payment | AFSCM – Contactless payments using Mobile. Hmm – Octopus.com.hk anyone?
• Ronan Le Goff – Impressive sailor and nice guy who owned the house we stayed in while in Brittany.
• Teens Don’t Tweet; Twitter’s Growth Not Fueled By Youth | Nielsen Wire – Interesting factoids from Nielsen on how twitter under-indexes the overall web use for the under 25 segment.
• Apple Wants To Build A PayPal Killer, Say Wall Street Gossips (AAPL, EBAY) – This makes immense sense to me. iPhone users are used to their iTunes app and make micropayments ($0.79, say, for a tune up to £20 for an app and £100 for their .mac account…). In the absence of a PayPal app on the iPhone (invoked how? with no multitasking and clunky hand-shaking between apps…?) this would make sense.

  Certainly it’s no more onerous than Google Checkout and would be better integrated.

  Cat, pigeons, amongst.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 12th through August 1st:

• House of Fraser directors to join Crombie | News | Retail Week – House of Fraser directors June Lawlor and Colin Porter are to leave the department store to join menswear brand Crombie in September.

  June Lawlor, who was director of womenswear, accessories and beauty at House of Fraser, and Colin Porter, who was commercial director at the department store, will join Crombie as joint managing directors.
  The duo plan to revamp the brand, focusing on its heritage and on producing classics with a twist. They also plan to expand Crombie’s network of standalone stores, concessions and its website.

• Songbird – Open Source Music Player – iTunes alternative that – w00t – plays FLAC (lossless audio format) files. Will play at high definition (24bit/96Mhz) and so with an external DAC makes your mac the storage and source “heart” of a digital uber-hifi system.
• Blue Circle Audio, Inc. – The USB Thingee HO – DAC and pre-amp. Rave reviews, characterful (unique) construction and a fifth of the price of the Benchmark DAC 1 PRE…

  Now, where do I get one of these in the UK?

• GoodSound! Equipment Review – Benchmark DAC1 Pre Digital-to-Analog Converter and Preamplifier (2/2009) – Wishlist… wish wish wish
• X Lossless Decoder (XLD): How to create flawless CD rips on Mac OS X :: What.CD – Setting/tutorial for the XLD ripper for OSX that creates FLAC files.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 11th from 15:42 to 16:52:

• Linn Records – specialists in Classical, Jazz and Celtic music – … and now with Studio Masters available for download
• AIX Records – Audio Fidelity Beyond Reality – High definition audiophile downloads…
• HDtracks high resolution audiophile music downloads – High Definition downloads. 24bit/96Khz. Limited selection for now – just like CDs in the old days 😉
• Ripping it Right! – High Quality CD Ripping | Home Entertainment – Quality ripping tips – squeezing all of the quality out of a CD. Doesn’t include upsampling tips.
• Computer Audio for the Audiophile | Home Entertainment – Outboard DAC review and roundup of audiophile-grade audio playback from a Mac. Now the question is how to get 96Khz audio into iTunes in the first place. Oh, and getting a cheaper DAC – $4k isn’t really ‘audiophile’ – it’s “divorce” 😉

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 1st through July 8th:

• MAMP: Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP – Quoth ye site:
  “The abbreviation “MAMP” stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X!
  MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer, be it PowerBook or iMac. Like similar packages from the Windows- and Linux-world, MAMP comes free of charge.
  MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files!”

  Sounds interesting and a nice way to play server without messing up one’s MBP…

  Furthermore, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the “normal” OS X).

• About & Tour | Sifter – BaseCamp lookie-likie bug and issue tracking software. Hosted, not cheap, but certainly cheerful looking.
• KartOO : The First Interface Mapping Metasearch Engine – Looks pretty. Some interesting links. Not the hyperbolic tree viewer I’d expected, so that’s good. Via Mark Russell
• Maturity Model approach to web analytics – from https://blog.immeria.net/2009/06/tale-of-web-analytics-near-miss.html

  Interesting to see the CMM approach now applied to as assessment of an organisation’s approach to web analytics.

• A tale of two retailers – Very interesting article comparing the IT approaches of two retailers – House of Fraser (disclosure: a client of mine) and ASOS. The two IT directors comment on the approach to IT. At HOF it’s the ecommerce team are the digital ‘haves’, while at ASOS it’s more pervasive (as befits an ecommerce pureplay). The challenge is the extent to which legacy systems and business approaches are a ‘defensible investment’ or a drag on progress.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 24th through June 30th:

• Ruder Finn Intent Index – Interesting index on consumers’ intentions for their use online, and some lovely graphics too.
• Alice.com – Managing home essentials online – brands, direct to customer rather than via a supermarket… Interesting to know the ownership of Alice… P&G? Big Brands? Challenging the supermarkets…? Or another WebVan?
• Quicklist: Diptyque luxury body and beauty products from Liberty – Nice quicklist feature (right hand side – purple button).
• Gift-Library.com : About Gift Library Luxury Shopping – Personally ‘curated’ gifts. Nice tone of voice and clear idea of the persona
• Direct2Dell – Direct2Dell – DELL COMMUNITY – Horse’s mouth story of the success of Dell’s twittering – $2m in revenues

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 21st through June 23rd:

• Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy | Derek Sivers – Useful summary and factoids:

  “For 10 years, Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice. For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”, they ran a great test:

  They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams. 40% of the customers stopped to taste. 30% of those bought some.

  A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams. 60% of the customers stopped to taste. But only 3% bought some!”

• Sheena S. Iyengar – Research – When Choice is Demotivating:
  Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?
• Vans Custom Shoes – Like Nike ID, but you can ‘invite your friends to design with you’.

  Produced by fluid.com

• Lucky Brand Jeans – The use of video is well-integrated and restrained, while the ‘chat to a friend’ feature on every product page is straightforward and actually works.
• Almond Cookies I – All Recipes – These worked – most tasty. I made with an extra 30g of ground almonds instead of the flour.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 9th through June 17th:

• activeCollab 2.1.2 is Available for Download | activeCollab – Project Management and Collaboration Tool –
• Microsyntax.org –
• GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid | Augmented Reality –
• SOFA – Design, Interfaces & Software – How beautiful is this design? really? ‘Tis luscious.
• 50 Alluring Typography and Grid Focused Websites | The Design Cubicle – Nice list of very attractive sites.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 25th through June 2nd:

• House of Fraser boss urges retailers to support retail diploma | News | Drapers –
• YouTube – What’s Your Moleskine In? – ay yi ay. What craftsmanship! Handmade leather covers for Moleskines. What a pity that the paper’s not worthy of this, but wonderful nonetheless. I want one.
• Royal Mail Environmental Policy – Sustainable Mail –
• Can you believe it? New Yorker cover done on iPhone app. – Interesting, but there are times when surely a piece of paper and pencil have more to offer 😉
• Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera iPhone application – Augmented reality coming to iPhone – Augmented reality – tantalising demo. Sadly not yet real. Very very interesting though… Imagine this + merchandising engine… Add a head-up display and we’re much closer to Star Trek…

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 20th through May 25th:

• Mobilizy – Wikitude AR Travel Guide – Augmented Reality travel guide. Looks like a product. Only on Android atm
• Impressive Augmented Reality Game Possibilities on the iPhone – Augmented reality. The demos and mockups are getting better…
• Plugging In $40 Computers – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – $40 -aka “soon to be nothing”; self-configuring IP… “every lightswitch can be a server”… etc.

  Leaving the hype aside, the combination of small, cheap, robust and lightly-programmed simple(r) chipsets in pluggable and robust armatures is a further step towards sensors, feedback and ‘extensions’ everywhere.

  Interoperating node + sensing + extension + data portability = interesting.

• Polaroid Two – Digital Instant Camera – buy at Firebox.com – I want!
• Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa – O’Reilly Radar –

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 18th through May 19th:

• A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing – Social network stats and where/how to access them. Useful.
• Staction – Simple communication based project management and time tracking – Hm – two passions in one: project/management software AND command-line interface and rich fingertip control. Worth watching. Can’t help that this is all thanks to UNIX geeks meeting Twitter interface and making beautiful sweet love.

  Thanks to @offmessage for this. You know me too well 😉

• Bazaarvoice Releases Traffic Stats – “Austin-based Bazaarvoice, which provides online applications to online retailers for ratings and reviews, said Friday that the firm now has served what it says are over 50 billion user-generated ratings, reviews, and other information through its platform. The company said it now serves up 4 billion pieces of user-generated content each month. The firm did not say what that translates to as pageviews or unique users. Bazaarvoice provides tools that allows ecommerce providers to display and collect ratings on products they carry, which it offers as a software-as-a-service offering. The firm said it now has 525 brands using its products. “
• True Knowledge – Blog: How to build a Universal Answer Engine: ten vital principles – Interesting post on their principles of knowledge, the corpus of data, inference, contribution – and OS software and speed. Good insight.
• How Our Primary Source of News & Information Changed in the last 200+ Years – Moving from Traditional Media to the Internet – Nice graphic in the changing mix/source of news over 200 years. Via @azeem