Okay, so in the course of work (developing games for mobile phones for the next week and a bit) I’ve been playing with GPRS and watching the news in the mobile world. The ideal is somewhere near Paul’s vision, in that Microsoft currently want to design a box that syncs with your alarm clock so it can, for example, tell you that the traffic is murder and you’re going to have to leave early. This is an idea I like. Stuart‘s, however, is an idea I’m scared of, because the future is now.
Bluewater is a FOG shopping centre hiding in the Kent countryside just south of London. It was slightly lacking in mobile coverage, so they employed NTL to help it along. The results are that each customer with a mobile phone can be tracked though the centre, the central system can tell which shops they go in, how long they stay in the centre, and where they go. They can even send text messages to the phone, with special offers they might have missed.
I’m not really paranoid about user tracking. I don’t block cookies, and I’m not exactly a difficult person to track down. (Really. According to Google this site is 12 for “Avenell”, #1 for Nicholas-Avenell, Aquarion and Aquarionics, and Nine of the top 10 results for Nick Avenell are me, even if I don’t go by that name very often any more), And I activly like the idea of a CMS that follows me around a site and recommends other things I might like. I do, however, object to being told it isn’t happening, and that it’s being done for my privacy and security.
In other fun and exciting news, Category based browsing has been written and enabled, although I still have to do the index for it. Oh, and writings is back, although none of the old content has been put in yet.