FIVE SUMMER GIFTS #1: STM Judge Laptop Brief 15″

STM’s durable and good-looking laptop bag is perfect for commuting, travelling and even a wet festival.

STMIs the STM Judge laptop any good? It’s never easy to find a laptop bag that fits perfectly. Whether it’s too many pockets, wrong shape/colour or non-personal-brand-representing, it’s a struggle.

While I’ve often looked at the high-end, burnished leather from an extortionately expensive Italian designer type of product whenever I have that long-desired ‘result, to date I’ve put up with cheap, black cases that make me look like a lower-manager with an ugly wife and difficult children.

However, please be introduced to the Judge Laptop Brief 15” that I have been roadtesting these past two weeks (and in the colour of the associated image above). And when I mean roadtested, I mean a wet festival in Cornwall when I had no other bag to hand.

First thing is that it doesn’t have too many pockets, that is a very good thing. A strap and a handle, an outside pocket and a couple inside, that is also very good. It can hold a MacBook, charger, newspaper, notebook, phone charger and a paperback without any bulge.

It’s also light. Leather laptop bags when full can be a pain, as if a hot plate has been placed on top of the sciatica and for somebody who has back troubles, a travelling nightmare. Fortunately, the STM Judge passes with ye olde flying colours in this respect.

It has also has ‘SlingTech™’ protection not only pads out the Judge it also suspends it away from the edges of the pack keeping it isolated from the impact zone. I’ll take the retailer’s word for it on this.

Finally, and most pertinently in these increasingly turbulent economic times, the price point at $99 in the US or £64.95 in the UK is reasonable. As would be expected, it can be purchased from the richest man in the world’s site here.

A decent product that should last a decent amount of time. I liked it.

Amido’s containerisation rolls out Coats web app

Industrial thread manufacturer stitches its industry’s digital agenda using Amido Azure container service.


amidoAmido, a technical consultancy specialising in assembling and integrating cloud technologies, has been chosen by Coats to build a scalable platform to help its customer base manage its corporate responsibility during the supply chain process.

Amido works with brands like ASOS, CBRE and Channel 5 to remove friction from their customers’ online and mobile experiences to drive revenue and engagement. The company are ranked 12th in The Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100 league table, the UK’s top 100 SMEs with the fastest-growing international sales

Furthering the company’s commitment to digitally transform its services, the application is one of the first enterprises to use Azure Container Services in a customer-facing environment. By using Amido’s technical expertise, Coats launched a web portal on a container-based platform, laying down a challenge to industry sceptics who are critical of container solutions.

Amido’s recommendation to use containers came from Coats’ requirements for an adaptable, scalable and manageable platform that would adhere to the strict regulations of global trading. With large investments from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the option of containers is becoming an early viable solution. Over the next three years, Amido predicts that there will be a large rise in its implementation.

“Containers give clients more control over the infrastructure they are deploying. This is because you are not creating a Virtual Machine for every instance of an application, meaning deployments are rapid and the overhead of the operating system is significantly lower.

“It means that we can issue an upgrade/change that will take effect almost immediately, without disruption to the general use of the portal. This advantage of application upgrades and changes is vital, especially when committed to digitally transform its services – without the added costs legacy systems can bring,” said Chris Gray, Technical Director of Amido.

Amido warns that containers are not a magic fix for all legacy or monolithic solutions and the decision to containerise software needs to be considered carefully. Containers are valuable when monolithic applications can be split into smaller components which can be distributed across a containerised infrastructure.

“We are breaking new ground in our industry with this platform. Speed is everything, so scaling and adapting is very important to us. We looked for a partner that understood all technologies, platforms and applications to help us. Amido met these requirements and we were able to create a system that not only challenged container-use perception at an enterprise level, but also did so in a timely and cost-effective manner,” said Basheer Shahul, Digital Solutions Director, at Coats.

BOOK REVIEW: The # Monumeta Social Media Book

Many have tried to write fiction based on social media with mixed success. Monumeta goes a long way to being the definitive work on the subject.

monumetaWhat is The #Monumeta Social Media Book? At first look, it appears to be a hashtag-led manual that will teach readers how to use the media. However, this is misleading, this book may finally be the fiction that brings together modern-day reality, old school storytelling and a possible future.
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Inflight Wi-Fi is five years old… the data is weird

Inflight Wi-Fi has not yet hit critical mass, but data from airline Norwegian reports that our mobile and online habits are no different in the air.

inflightFive years ago, Norwegian was the first European carrier to offer free Wi-Fi on all routes. Since pioneering the service in February 2011 more than 19 million passengers have logged in at 35,000ft and digital addictions remain the same airborne.

According to a study from Norwegian, more than a third of passengers log into social media within five minutes of a flight and just one in ten passengers said they take a break from social media during a flight.

The airline polled a representative selection of 1,000 passengers across Europe about their inflight surfing habits and combined it with data usage from more than 550,000 flights to reveal what people are browsing, sharing and tagging over Europe’s skies.

More than 18,000 passengers access Norwegian’s free Wi-Fi every day, with the biggest demand on routes to and from Spain. Since introducing the free service more than 500 terabytes of data have been consumed on board flights – the equivalent of streaming 1.2 million songs, receiving 170 million emails or watching 25,000 hours of Netflix.

The most popular websites visited by people from the UK are news sites including BBC, Guardian and Daily Mail, followed by Right Move and Amazon. Inflight Wi-Fi has contributed to new social media trends with half of 18-to 25- year-olds logging into Instagram to take a selfie or post a wing shot. To date #flyNorwegian has been tagged over 12,900 times on Instagram

Norwegian’s Wi-Fi works via an antenna fitted to each aircraft that communicates with a satellite mounted on the fuselage. Inside the aircraft, there are two separate networks, one that is open for passengers and one for pilots and cabin crew that to make their work in the air easier and more efficient.

Norwegian has continued its pioneering technological spirit by becoming the only airline to offer a ‘bring your own device’ inflight entertainment system across Europe, and becoming the first European carrier to introduce live television in November 2015.

UK ecommerce startup Ometria pulls in $1.5 million seed funding

ometria_fundingE-commerce analytics company Ometria has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from a group of high-profile investors and entrepreneurs, including Huddle founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin.

Founded in London little more than 12 months ago, Ometria has staff in Moscow and operates a real-time platform targeted at online retailers that provides analytics for ecommerce businesses; it can be integrated with ecommerce platforms such as Magento and Shopify. Continue reading