I want an iPhone - but now is not the right time

I have been pondering for some weeks whether or not to get an iPhone and last week decided to take the plunge.  Given I had to be in the office on Friday, and I needed to be at home for the iPhone to be delivered, I put off ordering it until this Monday.  Good job too!  On Friday Orange announced they (my provider) O2 no longer had exclusivity with Apple, and you will soon be able to get iPhone on Orange UK.  Then, hot on the heels of that, it seems that Vodafone UK will follow suit in the spring.

Hold tight!  Prices will have to come down with this level of competition around, and I can certainly wait in a recession for lower prices!

Taxi!

Dependent on the time of day and your location, hailing a London cab is often a random game of chance - will you, or wont you, manage to find one of those welcoming golden lights which stays lit all the way along the road until it reaches you? A game of chance, of course.

Prefacing this with a "I have not used this service yet", it was a very pleasant surprise to hear of a fab use of technology in the London cab market. TweetALondonCab - yes, send a direct message on Twitter saying where you want to go from and to, and a cab turns up. Start by checking their Twitter page and their website to see how it works. Good luck, guys, you are ahead of the game.

Spotify is so much cheaper than iTunes - it's free!

For those of you who spend too much time at your PC/laptop and want an easy way to play your own selection of music as you work. Better still there's no downloading from iTunes and even better, the basic service is FREE! As I type this, I'm listening to some rag-time piano by Scott Joplin. You need to go to Spotify.com and download a very small app, and it's dead easy from there. The freebie service includes adverts every so often, but hey, they're short and only ever one at a time - so nothing like your local commercial radio station which seems to be playing more and more advertising minutes per hour than you thought was legal.

UPDATE:

Unlimited Streaming Music on iPhone: Apple Approves Spotify

UPPER CASE or lower case?

I get asked this one on a fairly regular basis, so let's cover it off here.

Email addresses
These can be upper or lower or mixed case. Your email system does not care, and in fact will convert it to lower case. So, if it makes it easier to read on business cards etc, use mixed case like JohnSmith@MyCompany.com

Website addresses (aka "URLs")

• Your basic domain name can be mixed case - so www.MyCompany.com and www.mycompany.com and www.MYCOMPANY.com will all get to the right place
• After the basic domain name you need to match the correct case or a browser may not find the right page. So http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cart/view.html is not the same as http://www.amazon.co.uk/GP/cart/view.html for example. This is because some websites are hosted on an operating system called Unix which does care about UPPER and lower case.

Passwords are usually case sensitive and I would encourage you to use upper and lower case letters and digits in any password - this makes it much more tamper-proof.

Cloud Computing

"What on earth?", I hear you say! A good start (if you like lots of detail) is the Wikipedia definition, but I'm planning a short update here to give an overview.

The simple approach is that Cloud Computing is where you are storing information on the web, rather than on your hard drive or a memory stick, and you do not necessarily know or care exactly where it is stored. So examples would be

• GMail but not Outlook
• Google Documents but not MS Word or Excel
• Facebook
• Flickr and other photo storage sites
• etc

Benefits - you can work from anywhere and know that you have all the information available at your fingertips. a personal "Paperless Office" - hence the title of this blog. And yes, I do operate a paperless office! Those of you who have seen my desk will laugh, but any hard copy here would have arrived by post and will ultimately be destined for my bin or my shredder.

Word of caution. If you are storing business information in this way, you ought to find out where the data is physically stored as any legal issues with the data could need to be handled under the laws of that country.