Last night on Twitter, I managed to connect with someone I have been a huge fan of for a very long time.
I’m talking about the respected tech journalist, broadcaster and science advocate Maggie Philbin.
Maggie’s infectious love of technology helped to inspire me and many, many others to get involved in ‘tech. After all, Maggie was the first person on UK television to demonstrate the word’s first truly mobile phone, car navigation system and countless other gadgets we take for granted today.
I was going to list Maggie’s TV and radio credits here – before realising it would be pointless; unless of course, the point is to end up with Carpal tunnel.
The TeenTech project
What I was not aware of until recently, is the pioneering work Maggie does, helping teenagers get involved in science and technology, through the highly-acclaimed TeenTech project.
Maggie puts it like this:
“In Britain we have a history of viewing scientists as remote loners, who pursue their unfathomable work in dusty laboratories. In an era where many children aspire simply to “be famous” and where winning “X Factor” is seen as the ultimate goal, it’s vital for the science and engineering community to raise their profile and use powerful role models to help young people understand the reality of these professions.
It’s heartbreaking to think of the amount of talent and innovation going to waste, simply because children and their families haven’t the faintest idea what an engineer or technician actually does.”
By the way, TeenTech will run again in 2010, as part of Science Week. I will post full details on both Science Week and TeenTech, closer the time.
What did I miss?
So, the tech news blog has been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. In that time, quite a bit has happened.
Windows Weekly laporte thurrottClearly, the BIGGEST story in tech news during that time, was that I got to name the title of last week’s Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte “bing is my back end“. Yeah, I’m a big fan of the show (thanks Leo.)
What else did I miss?
Well, Gmail was offline for a couple of hours. It seems this caused many people to believe this now means cloud computing is dead and that the ultra-reliable Gmail service is now a hunk of crap. (Dudes, it was down for 2 fricking hours!!)
Skype has been sold by eBay – interestingly, not sold ON eBay though.
Sony has decided to ship notebooks with the Chrome browser pre-installed. I love Chrome and think that with some decent add-ons, it could tempt me away from my beloved FireFox.
Microsoft are STILL trying to do something in the smartphone market, with the release of another version of Windows Mobile (6.5). It seems the marketplace is not desperate to dump their Symbian-based phones or iPhone’s for it just yet though.
iPhones have started to explode in people’s pockets (at least in France), though NOT according to Apple. Apple claims that the French iPhones it has seen with cracked screens, were all caused by external force.
YouTube has decided to unblock UK users from viewing ‘official’ music videos, after banning us from accessing them for the past 6-months. It seems a deal has been cut and everyone’s happy again. Great news for all lovers of sub-standard audio/video.
What tech stories are YOU following right now?
Let me know what’s grabbing your attention in the world of tech, with a comment below. If you are looking forward to translate this content, contact Translation Agencies UK
