I Blog — I.CO.UK

Mixed Views on our Technological Future

April 22, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Pew Internet Research in conjunction with the Smithsonian magazine have just had a look at what US citizens think of their technological future.

The report is “US Views of Technology and the Future – Science in the next 50 years” (pdf)

In general there is some optimism around but we were surprised at the gender differentiation at an overall level with a significantly less rosy view from the female sector!

Looking 50 years out our health stands a good chance of improvement but our unpredictable weather is likely to continue!

You can even participate in a small (13 questions) Science and Technology Knowledge Quiz and see how you compare with the average American?

Filed Under: Technology

Easter Festivus 2014

April 18, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

It’s the traditional (internet) Easter egg hunt weekend so we’ve got together a few selections

Google search

Try:

Do A barrel roll
Tilt
Google in 1998
Anagram
Binary
Festivus

and try hovering on I’m feeling lucky for some additional options!

Google maps

YouTube

Do the Harlem Shake
Beam me up Scotty

and finally our all time favourite

Amazon

“Thank you David Risher…” which can be found on the Full Store Directory page as a “secret” link & it’s not at the top!

Spoiler

Filed Under: Amazon, Google, Net t'internet

Tesco continues to dominate UK online grocery

April 16, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Tesco announced their preliminary results for 2013/14 today with “… Strong UK growth in online grocery +11%”

We think this could be a little below the overall market increase on food sales per the ONS statistics which show an increase of around 12.5% as between 2012 and 2013.

Some say they have nearly 50% of the UK online grocery market which we find difficult to accept but they are undoubtedly the number 1.

In TOTAL grocery market share Kantar World Panels latest stats for the 12 weeks to 2 March have the top 5 as Tesco (28.6%) Asda (17.4%) Sainsburys (16.5%) Morrison (11.1%) and the Co-op (6.1%).

We guess the top 5 online would include Waitrose and Ocado with neither the Co-op nor Morrison, at present.

Tesco click and collect are following Asda in setting up collection from 6 London tube station car parks from temperature controlled vans at Osterley, Newbury Park, Rayners Lane, Finchley Central, Arnos Grove and Cockfosters.

This follows Asda’s similar ventures at East Finchley, High Barnet, Harrow & Wealdstone, Highgate Stanmore and Epping.

Waitrose are aiming, a little longer term, for the temperature controlled locker facilitiea which we think could be the future! With a total of 270 London tube stations there’s a way to go yet!

Here are Tesco’s words, extracted from their results announcement, on their online sector

“Clicks & Bricks

Our grocery home shopping business continues to grow strongly. We now have over 200,000 delivery saver subscribers and over 260 Click & Collect locations – including our first trials at six London tube stations. We are planning to launch around 50 non-store collection points in 2014/15, as well as adding the service to another 100 stores. We continue to build capability through the automation of ‘goods to person’ at our new Erith facility. This enables us to pick products almost three times faster than in our stores – an improvement on our Crawley and Enfield dotcom-only stores. Our new home shopping vans will be multi-category enabling us to fulfil general merchandise orders and will feature collapsible racking to carry larger items from our new general merchandise range. We will also focus on providing helpful, friendly and personalised customer service at the doorstep, with the roll-out of new training to all customer delivery assistants in 2014/15.

We have also committed to sharper prices this year for our grocery home shopping service, including market-leading delivery pricing and free Grocery Click & Collect. We will continue to focus on our most loyal customers, with a no-risk guarantee and added-value services on our Delivery Saver subscriptions.

The strong top-line growth of online general merchandise and the actions we have taken, such as tightening our stocked range, have reduced the level of financial losses in this business. We now have over 1,750 Click & Collect locations and plan to increase this number significantly. Our product offer on Tesco Direct has grown to over half a million lines, supported by 50 market place ‘Sellers at Tesco’. Clothing online continues to perform strongly, with sales growth of nearly 60% in 2013/14.

This year we launched the Hudl, our very own tablet. It was recently named winner of the ‘ReThink Retail Technology Initiative of the Year’ and we plan to launch a second device later this year. Blinkbox services continue to grow and we launched Blinkbox books last month with hundreds of thousands of books now available to download.”

Filed Under: Net t'internet, Retail

GO ON increase our UK digital skills

April 15, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Following yesterday’s Governmental programme aimed at seeking to reduce digital exclusion by 25% by 2016. GO ON UK today announce what they are doing to help Northern Ireland get connected where they reckon that nearly 25% of the adult population nearly 350,000 “…lack the Basic Online Skills needed to send and receive email, use a search engine, browse the internet and complete online forms. Almost a third of businesses and charities are also missing out.” It’s what we might call a digital coldspot in the UK!

This digital skills programme which has already succeeded in Liverpool and is well under way in the North East aims to deliver a 25% reduction in the number of people below the Basic Online Skills threshold in 12 months.

GO ON UK have already launched digitalskills.com which is “…aimed at people and organisations who want to inspire and support others to open opportunities online, it’s home to online tools and resources and a map which features over 3,000 UK Wi-Fi hotspots, computer access points and real people wanting to share their digital skills.”

You can GET INVOLVED here

The Basic Online Skills definitions are:

Who are digitalskills.com?

They were conceived and created by Go ON UK, the UK’s digital skills alliance.
Their chair is Baroness Lane-Fox and the founder partners are Age UK, BBC, Big Lottery Fund, EE, e-on, Lloyds Bank, Post Office and Talk Talk. The site is also supported by the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills.
digitalskills.com was built by Carswell Gould and continues to be developed based on your feedback. Tell them what you’d like to see.

Filed Under: Digital, Net t'internet

Smart Inclusive Government

April 14, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Gartner have come up with the 10 strategic technology trends for smart government which include:

Personal Mobile Workplace - Government IT organizations may have an illusion of control, … However, the reality is that employees, depending on demographics, personal preferences and pressure to improve performance, can decide how much they want to use corporate information and applications versus personal information and applications.
Mobile Citizen Engagement - Several inquiries with Gartner government clients reveal an interest in providing citizen-facing services using mobile devices, as well as leveraging social software functionalities.
Big Data and Actionable Analytics – Governments are searching for ways to use big data to gain business process efficiencies and reduce costs, but are having limited success.
Cost Effective Open Data – Governments become both providers of open data to each other and to the public at large (the latter just for public data) and consumers of open data coming from other parts of government as well as from businesses, NGOs and citizen communities.
Citizen Managed Data - Citizen data vaults are services that provide data subjects with the ability to access their data outside the context of a particular government transaction, allowing them much-finer-grained control over when and how data can be accessed, and by whom, within the relevant legal framework that they are subject to.
Hybrid IT and Cloud – The main objectives pushing cloud adoption have been cost reduction, speed of procurement and deployment, and responsiveness to regulations and needs for cost cutting. The public cloud is also gaining momentum as governments seek savings via consolidated procurement.
Internet of Things – Governments, as well as most enterprises and technology vendors, have yet to explore the possibilities of an expanded Internet and are not operationally or organizationally ready.
Cross Domain Interoperability – Smart government initiatives depend on interoperable information, data obtained from external as well as internal sources, and processing and delivery networks that effectively integrate planning, performance analysis and business operations.
Business Process management (BPM) for Case Management - There isn’t one market for case management because all cases are not the same.
Gamification for Engagement – Gamification can be used by government to motivate interactions with citizens or to achieve more meaningful levels of engagement with employees.

Elsewhere our Government is seeking to smarten more of us up via their Digital Inclusion Strategy aiming to reduce the number of people who are offline by 25% by 2016.

We hope they achieve, or in fact exceed, their target.

Filed Under: Net t'internet, Technology

Keep an I on our Week, Masters Marathon edition

April 12, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Our top articles this week were:

We’ll leave you with a flyover of the Augusta National Golf Club Course – probably the best …..

Filed Under: I week

The Internet of Everything Reinvents the Wheel

April 11, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Cisco in the form of their UK & Ireland CEO Phil Smith at the launch of their “The Internet of Everything: Bringing the future to life” report yesterday said ” With just 1% of the physical world connected at this time, this is just the beginning of an amazing future.”

They reckon that by 2020 50 billion “things” will be connected globally. So that’s 7 for every one of us!

The report itself looks at the UK situation in 5 main areas:

Healthcare: The innovations anticipated are almost endless and range from wearable video cameras for emergency response units through connected asthma inhalers to smart pill boxes.

Retail: Not only will the high street be smarter they think it will be intelligent as well. “For example, as a consumer moves through the high street and into different shops, an integrated Internet of Everything strategy can see them receive different location-specific content. Marketing tools will enable retailers to provide offers through push notifications, while time-related promotions will encourage consumer spend. Done right, cross-promotion based on immediate location will drive visitors from one retailer to visit others locally. All the while, consumer analytics based on demographic information and activity, such as dwell time conversion rates, and retailers also visited, will provide an intelligence service to improve the customer offer.”

Transport: We can look forward to “Stations-as-a-Service” smart cities smart parking an numerous other evolutions as we reinvent the wheel!

Energy: We will be connecting to conserve.

Manufacturing: “Today, just 4% of devices in that space (the manufacturing floor) are connected to a network of any kind; connecting more could help to dramatically reduce wastage and error.” Consumers’ relationships with purchases are being transformed as sensors and monitoring devices are built into not only the production process but also products themselves. “Cradle-to-grave” strategies tracking product lifecycles from the raw materials in the field through to refurbishment and renewal present manufacturers with major opportunities in the face of spiralling costs and dwindling resources.

The future’s bright the future’s connected.

Filed Under: Net t'internet, Tablets, Uncategorized

Dashing amazon

April 7, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

Click to enlarge

The “Dash” has appeared!

Amazonfresh their, somewhat embryonic, US based (Seattle, San Francisco & Los Angeles areas only at present) food store delivery service announced the (limited) availability of this new device last week. It’s by invitation only following application.

The trial we think is only available to Amazon Prime Fresh members (who subscribe to an annual membership fee costing $299 – the standard prime membership is now $99). Prime Fresh membership is currently available only in the Southern California and San Francisco, CA Metro areas. It sort of gives you the usual prime membership benefits plus free (next day) grocery delivery on orders over $35 ish.

Following the introduction of the TV set top streaming box last week the Fire TV with “voice search” this is the next device including this ability. In addition to the voice search for items it also has a scanning function for barcodes.

As ever via your WI-fi setup the device transfers your spoken and scanned items in this case to your amazonfresh account which can then be edited and submitted for order from your desktop/laptop or mobile app.

Seems to make a lot of sense to us although it does, sort of, introduce yet another remote to the household.

Here’s their promo video.