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Business ecommerce

High street shop closures

I was walking past a shop on Steep Hill in Lincoln on Friday night and noticed that it was closing down. It’s happening all over the place. I have a friend who has closed the doors on his tailoring business as he couldn’t afford the rent and rates. This seems to be a trend.

I don’t know the story behind the shop in the photo but it is interesting to note that the business is continuing on the www where it won’t have the same overheads. A sign of the times. The shape of things to come. The harsh reality of the present.

high street shop closure

Categories
Business business applications

Dell Vantage Club & Google+ instant uploader

view out of the dining room window of SoHo House club on Greek Street

Another interesting photographic weekend with the Galaxy S3. I was in Liverpool for a family party, staying at the Crowne Plaza on the Waterfront. Lots of photos – 3.3GB worth – 1,134 files. The hotel had a free option on its wifi, notionally for email & light browsing. I didn’t do any speed testing but when I got home, 150 or so of the pics had already been uploaded to Google+ using the free wifi and instant uploader.

This has to be the way to do it. You find your pics automatically backed up without thinking, as long as you chose the “wifi only” setting on the phone. The rest of the pics were taken off the phone before they had a chance to upload – I’ll have to adjust my “transfer policy” to give them time to upload.

me with me dear old MamThe inset photo is of me and me dear old Mam on Friday night at a private Davies dinner in the hotel. The header photo is the view from the private room at the SoHo House club on Greek Street in London Town. I was there for a Dell Vantage Club event where the topic of conversation was BYOD. I have to say I am becoming increasingly impressed with these Dell events. Dell is restricting the Vantage Club to 350 CIO/CTO types and it is a great forum for networking with others in the industry. I even bumped into a Timico customer there – great stuff.

PS I’m going to also have to start a policy of filtering the photos I keep on the laptop and offloading the rest to an external hard drive where they will provably never again see the light of day.

Categories
Apps End User mobile apps

phone storage capacity – miscellaneous musings after the Diamond Jubilee weekend

I must be trying to look cool - in adversity - I was having a good time at the Diamond Jubilee street partyYou may have noticed I have a tendency to stick photos in blog posts. I like to think it adds a bit of colour, enhancing the reader’s experience 🙂 I take most of them using my Galaxy S2. I always have it with me whereas it is a pain to carry the camera around. The camera does take better pics in the main, user skill level permitting.

I always seem to have 11GBytes or so free space on my phone and never get anywhere near to filling it up. My camera uses up its battery before filling up the memory. This would probably also be the case with the phone but I husband the power levels on that device – it’s mission critical.

After the weekend I transferred 1.4GB of photos and videos to my laptop – the total space used on the laptop by vids and pics as 167GB!

storage used for photos and videos over past 11 years I could still fit all the music on my hard drive onto the phone and still leave room for photos. I have 10.5GB worth of music though I hardly ever listen to most of it (I really do need to change my play list but I like Pink Floyd, Donna Summer, Bronski Beat and Joe Jackson 🙂 .

The size of the photo and video storage space is going to grow far more quickly than that I use for music which is pretty static – it’s an age thing. The chart on the right shows the growth in storage used for video and photos on my hard drive over the past 11 years. the last column is 2012 which has 7 months to go & we haven’t hit the summer holidays yet.

I store these pics in a variety of places. The question is how much is it worth to me to store them all online. 100GB is $199 pa on Dropbox. Microsoft SkyDrive is £32 per 100Gigs. Google Cloud storage is $12 a month ($144 pa) for 100GB but you also have to pay $0.12 per GB data xfer costs (from USA and EMEA – $0.21 from APAC) to access what you have stored (uploading seems to be free).  I guess that’s ok – thats only $12 to retrieve the whole lot.

Assuming I want to store all my photos on Google that would cost me twenty bucks a month (y’all) – roughly fourteen quid. I’m a heavy user but whatever the right number is for you this is probably going to be a cost we will all have to factor into our monthly household budgets in future.

That’s all folks…