Rather than a dystopian future, in the UK were clapped in the street during Coronavirus. Source: Damien Walmsley on Flickr
When my children were younger, if they heard bad news I would reassure them that there are many more good people in the world than bad people. This is one of the reasons we have so few police compared to the population.
Human Kind, written by Rutger Bregman in Dutch and then translated to English, takes this view a few steps further.
The book explains, in lavish and often repetitive detail, how we are naturally a good-natured species, and it’s the media that makes everything sound bad.
Although we are good natured in our actions, it seems there’s a part of our brain that is attracted to and remembers bad news over good news.
How did NASA send space probe Messenger on a successful space mission that took 6.5 years just to arrive, yet we can’t predict traffic in an hour’s time?
The fact this book was finished before Coronavirus was astonishing timing because the virus gave everyone in the world this very topic: radical uncertainty.
Radical Uncertainty was written by John Kay, a professor and director of several public companies, and Mervin King, the governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013 – including the 2008/9 financial crisis.
I absolutely loved this book. Whilst writing this review I flicked through the book and ended up reading several pages again.
The book’s premise is simple: how can NASA send probes into space, due to arrive at their destinations several years in the future, and everything goes according to perfect plan, arriving at a specific point in space right on the predicted time; whilst we fail to predict tomorrow’s stock price or today’s traffic? The answer is that when humans are involved, we experience radical uncertainty. Continue reading Book review: Radical Uncertainty→
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Mary Meeker’s latest annual Internet trends report has been released, and it’s as insightful as always.
New sections for this year include:
A new section on the ethics of data usage and regulation
Interesting sections on healthcare (expenditure by country, and their focus on preventable deaths); and China (the move from manufacturing, and the totally different user experiences, such as live streaming for ecommerce)
New section on education – US university enrolments falling, with online increasing
Here are my highlights (aka abbreviated research notes):
Slide 25: [USA-based] advertising purchasing is moving to Amazon/ Twitter/ Pinterest (basically, moving from Facebook or Google at a quicker amount than they are growing)
Slide 28 & 29: Balancing Customer acquisition cost with Life Time Value!!
Slide 32: Drive conversion from freemium (Spotify & Zoom), rather than seeking new customers
#51: Echo devices doubled last year to 47M. There are now 90,000+ skills for Alexa. Why? How are they promoted?
It’s time for my annual blog/ RSS feed clean up, and to share my preferred thought-provoking digital news feeds:
1. Chris Matts (The IT Risk Manager). Chris regularly updates his blog with practical advice for technology teams and senior managers such as “executives and transparency”, and he focusses his agile transformation articles on business managers rather than technology teams. That said, there are also a fair number of more technical articles about automated testing and development. https://theitriskmanager.wordpress.com
2. Doc Searls. Doc has several interests, mainly in privacy, photography and technology. Whilst I don’t agree with his extreme views on privacy and anti-advertising, his blogs and other feeds are very interesting to read occasionally. http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/
3. Google Webmaster Blog. there are several skills everyone in the digital industry should have, and one of them is an overview of search engines and how they work. The search engines are the key footfall, entry point, gateway and provider of revenue to almost every digital company. Stay up to date with Google on this blog. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/Continue reading Top 10 favourite digital blogs→
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When the iPhone was launched, industry commentators predicted that everything would have a touch screen. And then Alexa came along, and those commentators predicted nothing would have a screen – everything will be Internet-enabled and voice controlled.
And the latest version of Alexa – has… a screen! Sometimes I think Amazon’s product strategy includes Jeff Bezos’ sense of humour.
We have had a Google Home device in our house for a year now. Actually, my son bought it and it stays in his room. Everyone in our house has an Android phone, and the Home device tries to be extra clever by automatically linking our phones to the speaker. I remember the first time I worked from home after he bought the Google Home and I kept hearing something upstairs. When I went to investigate, all my alerts were being announced by Google Home in his room!
The new GoPro Fusion 360 degree camera. It looks outstanding, even if it makes your hand look a little odd on playback. Watching it again, I cannot believe the video quality of this tiny device:
“The Totem Pole” (real name) by the entrance to Plexal – impressive in reality
Plexal is an innovation area based in part of the former Media Centre originally built for the London 2012 Olympics. This morning I went on a tour of the facility with a few colleagues from Endava.
The CEO of Plexal, Claire Cockerton, took us around. Claire founded Innovate Finance after working at Level39, the Fintech accelerator.
Plexal has been designed around the metaphor of an ‘Innovation High Street’. You walk in half way down the ‘High Street’. The reception desk transforms into a bar in the evening. The High Street has several glass fronted offices on the ground floor, intermittently separated by open desk areas acting as communal areas. Offices range from large (a couple of dozen desks) down to one-person pods the size of old public telephone boxes.
Communal areas also serve as fixed, large desks for organisations wishing to rent a permanent desk and leave a few monitors in place. There are coffee machines and kitchens dotted around, essential for start-ups. The whole place is designed and finished immaculately (the offices which are not still under construction). Once finished, it will cater for 800 people. At the moment it’s just over half full. Continue reading Our visit to Plexal, London’s latest innovation area→
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In January LinkedIn released its new user interface. It’s now four months later and the user interface is still as shocking as its January release. Some of the best, unique, features of LinkedIn such as ‘who connects me to this person’ are hidden from view.
Do you want to refuse to link to someone because you don’t know them? The “I don’t know this person” notification appears out of immediate eye focus, so a. it’s hard to see and b. you need to either move the mouse (or your finger on the mobile version).
And the speed of the site is appallingly slow, with that irritating loading icon on every screen. LinkedIn owner’s, Microsoft, might as well show a rotating hourglass for nostalgia. Continue reading When did it get so complicated?→
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Every year I list my favourite gadget, book and app from the last twelve months, so here they are for 2016:
Favourite gadget
A smartwatch. I never expected them to be this useful.
During the summer I ran my first marathon and bought a running watch to track my runs. The watch, a Garmin Forerunner 235, has a number of smartwatch features, including alerts that show on my phone, such as text messages, calls, Facebook alerts and so on, also show on my watch.
The watch also has a step and sleep counter, which I’d never as useful beforehand, but the step counter is moderately addictive. I can tell how well I sleep – I don’t need a watch to tell me.
Although the user interface on the watch is terribly over complicated, I still love the watch. Friends who have an Apple Watch still need to charge them daily, and the Forerunner can last at least a week.
Favourite book
The book that stopped me tweeting before boarding flights
I haven’t read as many books this year, but my favourite was ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed’ by Jon Ronson. I like Ronson’s style of writing, and I’m constantly worried (and telling the kids) of the dangers of a simple social media update upsetting others.
If you are interested in social networks, I thoroughly recommend the book. Since reading the book I try not to tweet when I’m boarding a plane, just in case autocorrect strikes.
Favourite app
I have a few friends who have started producing podcasts, and they use Podbean. I’ve been using the Podbean app for a while, but I still don’t find it very intuitive. It could be much simpler.
My favourite app for 2016 was Google Maps. Google have released a number of new, really good features. As a family we travel all over the UK. Google Maps has excellent voice recognition and smart route navigation, taking real-time traffic into account. But the 2016 killer feature is being able to search for something en-route, such as a petrol station or a specific restaurant. This is also voice controlled, and results are shown along the route.
This leaves me to wish everyone who reads this site, and your family, a wonderful holiday period, together with a healthy, happy and prosperous new year.
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If you see these in the street, watch out for the impending stampede
There is a trend for financial and retail companies to offer additional benefits at the checkout – whether it’s spreading payments for large purchases, insurance or charity donations. Some banks are offering ‘save the small change’ functionality, rounding the purchase up to the nearest dollar or pound and putting that change into a holding account.
I know a few people who collect small change (or a particular coin). Every day they put it in a jar, then at the end of the year they donate it to charity or buy themselves a gift. This is obviously harder to do with electronic payments at the moment.
