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Nostalgia is no substitute for mobile video-conf success

You’ll have noticed, perhaps, that video conferencing by mobile phone is not a routine business tool. But why not? Five years back, a new codec was released by the International Telecommunication Union, which was expected to trigger just this breakthrough.

That's the start of another nostalgic "look back five years" piece I wrote recently for IT Week. You can read today's whole column online.

The piece also muses over the failure of what looked like a promising amusement from five years ago: Squiggle -

It’s not apparent either why a random scribble might be interpreted by a computer as an actual word – but you can do it if you have a Tablet. One such squiggle test was converted to Ascii as “boobbrain”, as reported in IT Week five years ago – yes, when tablets were all the rage, people used to do these tests just for fun.

- I remarked, quoting the edition of April 14 or thereabouts, 2003.
But (the column continues) "Frankly looking back, I’m more surprised by the failure of scribble analysis, than by the failure of phone videoconferencing."

Read the full nostalgic bit; but then come back and tell me of any good Squiggles you've created. And if you have, try to send a screen capture of the original...?

And don't bother with video conferencing...