I would also recommend The Island in Kensal Green on College Road. quite a chilled out place and great for localish drink . It plays good music too.

Thanks

Iqqy

Joe: thanks for your comment; wow, you met Annie Lennox and chatted about dogs! Your points about widgets, anonymity and security very well made too. Frogans sounds interesting – will look out for them! Thanks.

Widgets are cool in that, as limited as they are, they have the capacity to look online for some things, and in the guts of your device for others. Problem is, it’s often a matter of trust in assuming that n’er the two shall meet, and that what’s in your guts will never go dancing across the wires. It’s kind of like the way you trust that tapas chef to have washed his hands after relieving himself, and before preparing your delicacy.

Be wary, ye the widget collector. The more of these mini-apps you drop on your machine, the more anonymous each one becomes.

Later this year, and with little fanfare, Frogans technology will be released. Frogans are even more simplified than widgets in that the Frogans Player is the only app involved (kind of like an invisible browser) and the documents that come up like “widgety” mini-sites are authored using only a single XML-based language. No JavaScript, no HTML, no CSS, no wierdness. Okay, no sound, no video. But no access to your system resources either, and no writing their contents to disck, and each one can have as many shapes and looks as it has pages (unlimited).

Anyway, frogans won’t replace widgets. But they’re likely to catch on for computers, and later for mobile, for many of the same reasons driving the widgetisation of the Internet. And since you don’t collect them, but rather you collect their addresses, you can enjoy as many as you want without having to house any.

They’ve also got some wild user-interface features that make using them particularly enticing.

I told Annie that pit-bulls can be quite charming in the right environment, but that I wouldn’t get another one.

Re food: sounds like you were exposed to the worst of Brit food at Oxford! I’m hoping that things have changed significantly since then. London/UK is full of foodie surprises and gems if you look for them! I remember he Roadrunner ACME widgets too!

could you please write a post on the new cafe on Kingsbury road. I saw it recently never seen it before, its opposite the ‘kingsbury friut and veg’ shop a bit further up from phone city, there is also a new indian sweet shop, a bit like ‘Ambala’ also.

thank you . omar.

Z_dead: your question re telcos and data: well the situation right now is that beyond voice and text (which currently provide the revenues in this service industry) there *must* be something else because when the growth in the former starts to slow down (which it is doing in some markets) then the latter has to provide the growth. Charging for data at a flat rate by definition offers no long term growth because if everybody took up flat rate plans then you would reach zero growth again, and probably a lot faster than with voice and text. Look at what’s happened with broadband, if there’s no money left in it for an operator then it becomes a pure cost/margin play – which leads to consolidations or else you start to bundle broadband with other things, like TV, telephony, etc. i.e. things you can peg some growth and margin to. Widgets are not necessarily the answer – in fact probably not, but they are part of the story which is all about making it easier to do other things on your mobile that you don’t normally do today. But your point about no understanding of speed etc. is a testament to how zero-effort people treat their mobile phones. In fact on most consumer classes of 3G phone today the maximum downlink speed is 384kbps, but under widespread use in any particular cell you are more likely to get 128 or 64. (The uplink is 64kbps.) The point is that the average user doesn’t need to know this, they just need something that works without them thinking to hard about it. Something that works and something that they would value (i.e. pay for) but not something so expensive that they wouldn’t want to pay for it. And regarding widgets that talk to each other. This is also on the “conveyor belt of hype” at the moment, but there are some serious issues that need to be overcome first – like security and sanctity of monetisation models – e.g. on the latter for example if a an ad-funded widget is “mashed up” with another ad-funded widget then how do the original widget developers ensure that the mashup will display the ads correctly? And how will the advertisers ensure that their ads will be displayed?

Rockmother: You are a bit liek me when it comes to dabbling with code etc: self taught, but stick to the “don’t have to code” tools most of the time. Ah yes, Ivan Pope and Snipperoo. I like Sniperoo because it’s soooo like Ivan himself – doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t. I particularly like the “some are adverts, some do things and some make you laugh” description. In the case of Snipperoo, the widgets demonstrate all of the characteristics I mentioned in the above article, but are targeted for running inside web browsers, as opposed to on your computer desktop or mobile phone OS.

Tom: Thanks for your comment! Ah yes, Webwag, I sat next to your colleague Florent at the MoMo London widget session a couple of weeks back and we had good chat. Indeed, I even helped him with his live flickr widget demo for the audience that evening! I agree with your point re not having to be always connected – I omitted that from the above article because I felt that it was adding firther complexity to an already difficult subject (this is not really a tech-focussed blog), but you are right, mobile widgets in particular need to be able to be robust in a connection-limited environment. And I agree with you that mobile context brings a whole set of new challenges that are different from those that normally manifest in a PC/desktop environment. As you know there is a whole camp of people out there who believe that the desktop experience crosses over to mobile without change (or that it *should* do), but I do not subscribe to that. It might do so for a small number of geeks, but not for the masses. This is why I say that widgets are not the answer to the “great apps on mobile” problem. Widgets are predicated on “just another runtime” for developers to exploit. Being able to code mobile widgets doesn’t automatically grant the right to the developer to produce a usable application, nor an application that works om every phone, nor an application that can be discovered by everybody, nor an application that makes money. These challenges exist whether you do widgets, Java, C++ or whatever. Which is why mobile widgets are more about the long tail than they are about the few things that make a lot of money. Cheers!

http://blog.landspurg.net/webwag-mobile-beta-open-experiment-true-mobile-widgets-today

But mobile widget does not need to be ALWAYS connected, they just need to be synchronized. For instance, reading a “note widget” might be relevenat even if you are in the subway=not connected, as long as the relevant information is here.

That’s why the technical challenge are different, the usage pattern are different, the input methods are differents, and the answer might not be always the same one than on the web.