Graham's Blog

The Online Community

Some interesting stats reported on Carrie's blog provided by Google at a recent Local Government event.

• 44m people are online in the UK
• 90% of people said they must have broadband within a month of moving into a new house
• 17p in every pound is spent online
• 80% of internet users compare prices and options
• 1 in 3 consumers post a comment online a week
• 15 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• British people spend 1.2 billion minutes watching videos and movies online in a month
• An average user spends 43 mins per week streaming video vs 14.2 hours per week watching TV (so online video is around 5% of the total time people spend on video)
• 12% of UK households now rely on mobiles rather than landline
• 490m mobile internet users in 2008 globally (1b by 2011)
• There were 74.2 billion searches in June 2008.  That’s 11 per person for every person in one month
• iphone users search the web 50 times more than those on traditional movible devices.

I particularly liked the idea that Google thought that a USB stick was an appropriate freebie - there goes even more of our Personal Information.

Ever lost it abroad?

A British Passport is lost or stolen every 18 minutes, according to BBC News this morning, at huge cost to British Consulates and considerable inconvenience to the Passport owner.

Time to upload a copy to your PAOGAperson data vault . . . even better if the IPS would agree to provide us with a certified digital copy.

Have the Tories found the answer to NHS IT?

Well – sort of.

As a tax paying citizen, I am horrified at the £12.7 billion costs (and rising) of the current NHS  National Programme for IT (NPfIT) programme.

As an individual, I have no confidence, along with 90% of the population, that my personal information and medical records will be secure.

But, as a patient, I recognise that my ‘brown manila file’, currently in a pile in a corridor somewhere, is not the answer.

You can read my opinion on Business Cloud 9.

Personal Clouds and the NHS

Interesting articles from Stuart Lauchlan on Business Cloud 9.

I couldn't resist commenting on the Charles Fitzgerald, VP at EMC Decho, piece on Getting Personal and also Tories pledge NHS IT revolution in The Cloud supporting the views of Shadow Health Minister Stephen O'Brien and Dr Glyn Hayes . . . but then I started to rant !!!

We are doing it again - invented in the UK, funded in the US, marketed back to Britain. Will we never learn?