Small Data Forum Archives - NevilleHobson.com

It should be adiós and not hasta la vista baby

Today, Boris Johnson formally stood down as UK Prime Minister and has been replaced by Liz Truss who accepted an invitation from the Queen to form a new government. Thus culminates a fraught summer in which Truss and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak battled it out in a leadership contest that started in July with eight candidates vying for the top job after Johnson resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. And so we have a new Party…

Stop the show, I want to get off

If you’ve read any of the mainstream media in recent days, or glanced through the news feeds in your social networks, it wouldn’t take much to feel that the end of the world as we know it is imminent. It really is hard to talk about the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves in the UK – economically, politically, socially – without sounding like the most awful doomster and sensationalist. Yet, you cannot ignore the reality we…

Moving the podcast market

News that Apple’s new podcast subscription service is being delayed until June because Apple needs to tweak the Apple Podcasts app is a good reminder of how important the user experience is and ensuring it delivers on expectations. It’s also a great illustration of how a market moved. In the early homebrew days of podcasting, it was common for many podcasts to sound like they’d been recorded in the back of a garden shed on a rainy day, or the…

SDF 45: The vaccination mess in Europe

When Sam, Thomas and I recorded the 45th episode of our Small Data Forum podcast two weeks ago, who would have imagined that the major topic for us then – the EU’s COVID vaccination mess – would continue to be a major topic today, one that’s evolved and morphed into something even more alarming than it was then. We were pretty critical of the European Commission, how it is managing the vaccine rollout across the 27 member states, and its…

SDF 44: Facebook and the robber barons are at it again

Last week Facebook announced that it had decided to up the ante in its fracas with the Australian government and ban mainstream media news on its platform. The move meant that all Facebook users – not just Australians – would not be able to share or view news on Australian news Pages on Facebook. This move by Facebook was in response to the Australian government introducing a new law that would force Big Tech to pay media companies a fee…