Jason Stamper's Blog: April 2008 Archives

The 20 most useless British gadgets of all time?
April 30, 2008

A new survey has identified "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and there are a fair few surprises -- not least that some of the entries aren't British, or, to my mind, useless.

Anyway, how can it be a definitive list if it doesn't include Sir Clive Sinclair's electric vehicle of the 80s, the C5? The C5 had a range between charges as low as six miles, and you had to pedal to get it to go up hills. Little wonder Sinclair Vehicles ended up bankrupt.

Maybe an electric vehicle is not considered a gadget though? How are you defining gadget? Wikipedia says, "A gadget is a device that has a useful specific practical purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology. In some circles the distinction between a gadget and a gizmo is that a gizmo has moving parts, whereas a gadget need not have them." Ah, so the C5 is more a gizmo than a gadget.

Surprisingly, there weren't many products that are technology or IT-related. The highest ranking techno-gadget, indeed, is the Sony MiniDisc player, ranked as the fourteenth most useless gadget. I must say I was a bit thrown by that one, too.

First off, it's not a British product yet the survey says it sought to find "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and secondly, I can't quite see why it is such a useless product.

It may not be easy to buy the latest albums on MiniDisc, it's true, and you could argue the technology has been made obsolete by the iPod and its ilk. But the fourteenth most useless gadget? More useless, according to the survey, than egg slicers, electric tin openers and towel warmers?

I might have to start a MiniDisc supporters club in protest, although I would feel something of a fraud as I confess I have never been the proud owner of a MiniDisc (though if I had, I would have been very, very proud, and not kept thinking what a useless gadget it was, honest).

Besides, a MiniDisc player has moving parts, so doesn't that make it a gizmo, and not a gadget?

Anyway, what was the most useless gadget according to the survey?...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 10:25 AM | Comments (5)

De-dupe becoming part of storage fabric?
April 23, 2008

When I met Brian Biles, co-founder and VP product management of storage de-duplication vendor Data Domain a few weeks back, I asked how long it will be before de-duplication technologies simply become part of workaday storage arrays.

“Long term, de-dupe is likely to become a storage fundamental, for all areas of storage,” Biles told me. It may be sooner than that...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 05:09 PM | Comments (1)

BPM on demand, anyone?
April 21, 2008

Jon Pyke, former CTO of workflow and BPM company Staffware, and more recently CEO of The Process Factory, has long held the notion that it should be possible to do BPM on demand.

Now that he is the chief strategy officer of BPM firm Cordys, it looks like that vision is finally turning into a reality.

I just noticed that there’s a beta programme underway at www.theprocessfactory.com, powered by Cordys. I’ve not seen any press releases on this so yeagh, you read it here first.

“We have released the Beta of The Process Factory Solution to a private group of beta testers,” it says on the site. “All beta testers will get full access to Online Composer, with which they can easily build and run process centric applications, right inside their browsers.”

It lists a whole host of sample business processes that it says users will be able to build using the Online Composer, from asset management, to case handling and sales quote approval. It will be interesting to see whether, assuming the beta is a success and it gets something usable into production, The Process Factory powered by Cordys could start to get up a head of steam in on-demand BPM that salesforce.com did in on-demand CRM.

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

Any port in a storm: EMC buys Iomega
April 10, 2008

News broke yesterday that EMC, the daddy of the enterprise storage market, is buying Iomega, which does various storage offerings for consumers and small businesses. It’s the first time EMC has gone so far downstream – its Clariion storage arrays are midrange, but they’re still reasonably pricey pieces of kit.

So what’s the plan? Why does a company that has the upper echelons of the storage market so neatly sewn up want to pay $213m for a storage company that’s mostly a consumer/prosumer play?

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 11:08 AM | Comments (0)