Tom Hume

There's an MP3 of my talk at the dConstruct Web 2.0 event online, available here. Download it and experience me from the comfort of your living room or workplace.

Why good dancers are attractive: "It was Charles Darwin who first suggested dance was part of courtship rituals, something confirmed in nightclubs every weekend."

Heh. I'm not drunkenly lurching around the floor, I'm CONFIRMING DARWIN.

stevenberlinjohnson.com:: "It was simply a sign of something that was probably obvious already: there's nothing cool any more about having an iPod. That's not to say it isn't an incredible product. It's just hard to defend the cool factor when the President apparently has two of them..."

Actually, I'd argue that it's when things stop being cool that they start getting interesting. For me, this was the case with mobile phones: when they were something special that yuppies lugged around with them in the 80s: boring. When everyone you knew had one: interesting.

Ditto microprocessors, puzzles, and the internet.

Do gamers really want photorealistic graphics?: "The problem of increasing programming and artist time is one that a vast section of the industry is going to have to address. As budgets and graphical expectations (from the greedy gaming public) rise out of control, publishers and developers are going to have to make a choice: graphics or gameplay."

The assumption that photorealism means a better game, or that 3D means a better game: deeply flawed, I reckon.

Wi-fi not killing a telco, yesterday: "The France Telecom-owned cellco has some 1,700 Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK and access to a further 12,000 overseas as part of a partnership with Orange France, BT Openzone and WeRoam."

770 Party: "With way way more users on the mobile side… why isn’t the mobile web driving the wired web instead of vice-versa?"

http://www.orangecone.com/KMWorld_05_Presentation.pdf: "I believe that the waterfall model is fundamentally broken, and there are lots of
problems, but it’s a hard habit to quit: it makes everything seem like it’s going
great and the project is meeting its milestones, when in in fact it’s going badly
in all ways other than the Gantt chart. This is, however, a deeply rooted
methodology and can’t be changed instantly. "

Designing for illiterate people is an interesting one. It's something we've been looking at out of the corner of our eyes, sidelong-ly rather than a full on stare. I draw your attention this paragraph, about I-Cue founder Marc Lewis: "Marc retains a 75 per cent interest in ICUE but intends to channel all his profits into a new trust to help children and adults improve their reading skills."

Usability testing of mobile applications: "Usability testing a mobile application in the laboratory seems to be sufficient when studying user interface and navigation issues. The usability of a consumer application was tested in two environments: in a laboratory and in a field with a total of 40 test users. The same problems were found in both environments, differences occurred in the frequency of findings between the contexts. Results indicate that conducting a time-consuming field test may not be worthwhile when searching user interface flaws to improve user interaction."

Cameras as input devices: "As I’ve written in the past, one of the wonderful aspects of mobile devices is the availability of alternate input devices such as voice and camera. A recent News.com article on camera phone search technology describes several companies using the camera as web input."

Of course, all the noise recently has been around barcodes (in their 2D and 3D variety), but that's not all that can be done here. We're putting out a proposal in this area at the moment with some lovely ideas in it - you know, the kind that when you hear them you break into a grin because they're so very sweet.

I'll write about it soon.