In more recent years the council have put cameras on the bridge with ANPR cameras that recognize the number plates of cars that cross the bridge and automatically issue £30 fines.  However, I have recently noticed a stream of letters to the local news paper from angry foreign tourist and visitors who have been caught out and fined for crossing the bridge. An example letter can be found here and there is another story on the BBC website.  They generally complain that they did not see any signs. I checked on Google street view and saw the following picture:

What is people’s problem I thought? The signs are pretty small but they are standard “no motor vehicles” signs on the left and on the right. This is how I remember them. These people should either pay more attention or learn their highway code.

However today I was in Bath and I thought I would have a look for myself. Here is what you see as you approach in real life. Where are the signs?

A bit closer and you do catch a glimpse of a sign, on the left hiding behind a hanging basket.

In fact it is not until you you about to cross the bridge and get a fine that the sign appears from behind the hanging baskets.

There are no longer a standard “no motor vehicles” signs. Now there is just an more unusual, blue bus lane sign on the left hidden by the hanging baskets. I pity the foreign visitor who has to work out what it means. That is if they even see it.

Even I am a bit confused to what the sign means. The “no motor vehicles” is fine. I can look it up here. It is I am told a regulatory sign giving and order. The blue sign however seems to be an information sign for giving advanced notification of a bus lane. It does not appear to tell drivers not to do something.

I think think the complainers may have a point.

I went a bit further down the road and hung around for five minute. I counted four standard cars that came though and presumably would find themselves with a ticket in a few weeks like this lady:

If that is representative that is 48 cars per hour. That is a lot of money in fines per day many from people who are visiting the city. I much rather people go away with great memories of Bath, a city I love rather than thinking of it as a tourist trap.

As GWT generates JavaScript code I thought it would be suitable for packaging up as a mobile widget so as I have a Nokia phone I took the Nokia WRT kit and gave it a go. The results were very promising and my test GWT app worked very well on my phone, a Nokia E72.

The problem is of course that you cannot use RPC calls as you don’t have a server. However you can use JSONP to talk to a remote server which is perfectly adequate and this works well so far too. Using GWT to produce mobile widgets seems to have a lot of potential for creating mobile apps very quickly and with little pain. It would be great to hear from anyone else who is using this approach for mobile apps and any problems they encountered that I haven’t yet.

I am starting to think the growth of this type of UnConference throughout the world is marking the beginning of a shift in the IT industry. Developers in particualar seem to be attending events as individuals who are interested in their personal development rather than being sent to events as part of their day job. I see this as another sign of a shift towards independence of individuals in the industry and decreasing reliance on the organisation as discussed in Charles Handy’s book The Elephant and the Flea.

UnConference in Singapore on Saturday was a really good event. I took several things away from it and saw some interesting start-ups. The most important thing I got out of it though was an “oh yeah” moment when Scott Rafer the keynote speaker made a very important point about cloud computing.

Recently I have been looking at cloud computing in the form of Google App Engine and see a lot of potential in it. The advantages I am attracted to being ease of deployment, scalability, not having to manage the server and low hosting costs. At the same time my main worry is being at the mercy of the platform provider, in this case Google who could potentially suspend an account and so any revenue stream for any product running on it at whim.

The additional point Scott Rafer made in favour of cloud computer though was that cloud computing changes the business model for web start-ups in terms of their need for VC funding. What he said was that in the past if your start-up is building a web application you need to have a decent set of servers in case your app gets very popular very quickly and you need capacity to cope. This type of infrastructure is a considerable capital expenditure and one for which you would often need VC investment in order to fund.

However, cloud computing such as App Engine changes this situation because if you app gets very popular very quickly the capacity is there instantly. Most importantly you don’t need to pay for the capacity until you need to use it. You only pay for the capacity you use and if your business model is correct you should have the extra revenue to pay for the extra capacity. This could remove the need for VC funding which is obviously very attractive to a start-up in so many ways.