Simon’s Blog

Around the beginning of March, I wrote that flash memory prices were now at a level where we could expect mainstream laptop makers to start offering solid state flash drives. Yesterday, Dell announced that laptops with flash solid state drives (SSDs) were available to order in the US (and will be available soon in […]

There are now three significant platforms for rich internet application (RIA) development: Flash, from Adobe; Java, from Sun Microsystems; and now the brand new Silverlight (WPF/E) from Microsoft (I’m leaving AJAX out of this discussion). Currently, there’s a big debate around the question - which of these technologies will win out? In […]

There are two types of companies: those that care about their customers; and those that don’t. Recently I’ve written quite a lot about Sun Microsystems - a company that really seems to care about its customers, and goes the extra mile to do a good job, even if things don’t always go perfectly […]

If you read this blog regularly, you might know that we’re currently developing some new model-based computer vision technology that enables detailed information to be extracted automatically from large volumes of high-definition video. This is a computationally intensive activity - both on the storage and CPU fronts. We’re building a compute […]

I remember the day when SavaJe first made available a release of its brand new OS - it must have been around five years ago (maybe a bit longer). On that day, we were in the middle of developing a Java application that ran on PDAs, like the Compaq iPAQ. PDAs were an […]

By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Google is to pay $3.1B in cash to acquire one of the early pioneers of online advertising, DoubleClick (see the press release). I’ve seen a number of people writing that Google has overpaid here. The truth is, it’s quite possible that we […]

Usually, I don’t find Apple’s series of “Get a Mac” ads all that compelling. You know the ones, they start, “Hello. I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC”. It’s not that they’re not well-made. They are. The reason why I don’t find them compelling is that they’re often based around ideas that […]

When companies take the decision to move positions offshore - for example, to move positions from the UK and the US to locations in India and China - it is often claimed that the reasons for the changes are all about improving the quality of operations. A new study from Duke University, […]

I’m sure you know what digital rights management (aka DRM) is all about in the context of music and video. DRM is the name given to technologies that try to limit the ways in which consumers can enjoy music and movies. However, there’s a fundamental problem with DRM - it doesn’t work. […]