Mmm. Much-needed coffee, sunshine, a 2.5 hour drive to Cambridge and back, and then a summery weekend :)

FP client I-Cue wins Red Herring award: "I-Cue, the London-Based publisher of books-on-mobile, has been awarded The Red Herring 100 Europe award, which acknowledges the year's top 100 new companies for innovation and technology"

More here.

Rant against 3D: "3-D isn’t an interface paradigm. 3-D isn’t a world model. 3-D isn’t the missing ingredient. 3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue. Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it’s going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D"

Hear, hear. My favourite recent example of this was a guy at a recent mobile games event I attended, talking about mobile games his company had been producing. He proffered the handy statistic that 3D games sold the same amount as 2D games, but cost about twice as much to produce.

So... err.... why bother doing them then?

Along with 3D I'd also put the word "interactive" into the box of magical pixie dust words that get sprinkled onto crap in an attempt to make it interesting and appealing. Interactivity in and of itself isn't a priori a good thing. I think the video and film production industry might be learning this lesson, when balancing production costs for truly interactive narratives against the payback for doing them well.

Who is Randi Mooney?

T-Mobile bans VOIP from its flat-rate data services: "Such high speeds would seem to make the new data card ideal for applications such as Internet telephony and instant messaging. However, the fine print for Web'n'Walk Pro reveals that these are explicitly banned by T-Mobile, and any user caught running the applications risks expulsion from the network."

Well... I can't blame them for it, but it does rather mess them up as an example of operators becoming bit pipes.