I first picked my HTC One X a few months ago, the absolute moment I could upgrade my previous 18 month contract I had on my HTC Desire HD. I’m sure the Desire had some life left in it, except that I’d cracked the screen. Badly. While I was tempted to write a glowing report a week in, I put it off… I wanted to…
There’s a only handful of SaaS products I happily shell out cash for. One of my most valued subscriptions, since 2009, has been for Spotify. I use it several times daily, across all my devices, and constantly use it to share my tastes to my friends and the world (even though it’s disappointingly not available in my homeland of Canada where a good proportion of…
I’ve long held a particular theory about the world we live in, on the subject of time travel, that I’ve rehashed in my mind over the years. I’m not going to dig into the topics of parallel universes, alternate realities, or fate. But I will state this: Time travel* never will be made possible, at any time in the future**. Caveats: * Useful time travel,…
I used to be pretty intensely private about my life, at least when it came to sharing online. That started to change for me when I met Twitter, and slowly and tentatively started putting a little more of myself in the public eye with each tweet. I’ve been exploring the new Timeline view in Facebook, and I love it. I did, however, have a peek…
I stopped by the old BraveNewTalent offices today, partly to see if I could get my hands on an Amazon order that had been accidentally delivered there a day too late… and partly, I think, to say goodbye. I stood to admire the lovely door facing Beak Street (have I mentioned I’ve got a thing for old doors?), before punching in the familiar key code…
I discovered last year that I love travelling alone. Not to be anti-social, but I find it gives me the chance to really gather my thoughts, and (with the inherent lack of mobile data while abroad) force myself to be “off the grid”. Previously, travel, to me, was a thing you did with family, some friends, or a partner. I had to rip myself from…
I am psyched, seriously excited, to be heading back to Canada over the holidays. The plan is to do a fly-by visit to both Toronto (2-3 days) and Montreal (3-4 days), followed by a very short stint in NYC (for just under 42 hours, by my calculation) just in time to ring in the new year. While I would have loved to have spent more…

Coming up at BraveNewTalent are some exciting times. We’re growing in clients, revenue, and users at a fantastic rate, have appeared in a stack of national papers this week, and as a team, are having an absolute blast. Case in point: This weekend, when we held our first official “hackathon“. We needed a Facebook application, fast. With our client list growing, we needed to create a…

You’ve probably come by here either by accident or by checking out what this ‘SimplyBastow’ thing I’ve got as my email domain is all about. Truth is, not much, at this moment, although at various times in the past, I’ve used the name as a cover for my sporadic freelance product and project management consulting. At the time of writing (as you might notice), I’m…