Aden Davies – Page 26

The (distinctly lacking) joy of banking

For an activity that relates to the thing we spend most of our waking lives accruing, banking delivers precious few moments of joy. Maybe the slick resolution of a problem when you expected a battle? Or the paying off of a 25 year mortgage? But what about those daily moments of joy that offer up a little smile. I saw Ben Huh, he of smile inducing website ICanHasCheezburger.com, speak at FOWA a few years back. Ben said their whole business model was built around 5 second moments of joy. Of course pictures of cats with humourous captions are not quite an apples to apples comparison with banking but how many banking propositions and services factor in any kind of joy let alone a whole 5 seconds worth?

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy gave an exceptional talk at TED Global last year entitled sweating the small stuff. As well as having some useful suggestions for cash machines, Rory also gave examples of small details that brought momentary delight. My favourite being the lift at a hotel in Sweden which featured the usually designed buttons that at first glance you would think are for the individual floors but they are actually for your choice of lift music. Other examples included the cute little airplane shaped salt and pepper sellers in Virgin First Class that bear the stamp ‘Stolen from Virgin’ underneath, reflecting the fact that people so often liberate them. A knowing smile and a fuzzy warm glow must beset a person upon the first notice of these things? And while the line between joy and novelty may be a fine one, the organisations that never get near to this line maybe lacking the culture of little moments of joy internally let alone externally.

Another recent example is Little Big Details which showcases little pieces of online design that you can see a person has put real care and love into. From the small download progress indicators in Google Chrome to the delightful credit card input forms on GitHub.

These little signature pieces by individual designers or smart thinking groups show the love they have for their product. Would these wondrous little things make it past the early design stages of large corporate processes? Would the developer/designer be brave enough to even try? Or should Internet Banking be a functional utility rather than a thing of beauty? I think I share the opinion of Brendan Dawes on the latter…

The food industry increasingly features such moments of joy. Innocent drinks with their hidden bottle messages and I recently saw a great example from Sheffield’s very own makers of sugar loaded cupcakes of wonder, Fancie. The ‘eat by date’ on their boxes is very nice (as are their sugar loaded cupcakes of wonder).

And it is not just food companies. How about email newsletter publisher MailChimp giving a bit of motivational encouragement after delivering a campaign?

But can a heavily regulated industry get away with such frivolity? Is it ‘on brand’ for a bank? How about some humour on your mortgage statement? ‘Your Mortgage will be paid off sometime around 2035…If I were you I would overpay as much as possible so you can sod off round the world sooner rather than later’.

Maybe I am completely wrong (almost certainly if past indications are anything to go by) and all people actually want from banks are ultra slick almost invisible interfaces that just get out of their way (which would actually bring joy) and let them get on with doing something more joyous elsewhere. Or maybe I am right and people would like a bit of humanity, a flair for design or just 5 seconds of joy in their banking lives. If anyone has any great examples of little moments of joy from a bank I would love to see them.

February 24, 2011 7 Comments

Ignite London 4

February the 8th 2011 will long be a landmark day for me. It was the day I first got on stage and spoke in front of a room full of strangers. It was also the day I went to a cracking event. The event was Ignite London. For those who are unaware Ignite events are a night of quickfire presentations designed to enlighten in a short time. Twenty slides which auto advance after 15 seconds give the presenter 5 minutes dead to tell a story, share some insight and get off stage. The venue was 93 Feet East on Brick Lane in London and the organisers had lined up 18 speakers including little old me. I received a tweet out of the blue asking if I would like to talk at the event. I instantly said no saying I was neither smart enough or interesting enough. With a little encouragement I was persuaded into submitting a talk outline. This was subsequently accepted leaving me in a state of panic. But enough about me (for now) what about the actual event?

The list of speakers was very impressive indeed. It contained a few people I had heard of before and quite a few I followed on Twitter already. The night was split into three blocks of six speakers. The venue was nightclubesque and as it filled up the temperature rose as geeks piled into the narrow space in front of the stage. Randomly one of the attendees (spotted by my eagle eyed boss) was Sally Bercow the wife of the House of Commons speaker.

The first session was of a very high quality indeed with talks on snobbery around wine making, sensory food experiences, saving libraries and a look at who owns your data. The highlight of the session for me was Charlotte Young who talked Art Bollocks. She did not actually talk Art Bollocks but dismantled it completely. Very very amusing indeed or should I say the narrative form attempted to derive mirth from the introspection of self via the exploration of a conceptual paradigm held within everyone of us. I am not very good at Art Bollocks. Watch the real thing instead.

Second set of speakers raised the bar again. A fascinating talk on Transport map designs by Maxwell Roberts, a look at the classic I-Spy books, Paul Clarke rattled through why music is cheating. A look at how some forms of music are actually unplayable. Michael Reeve decided to live his life by the roll of a dice. This involved it actually controlling his movements round his flat, meaning he spent a lot of time trapped in his bedroom (dice can be cruel).

My favourite talk in the second session was Steve Berry’s talk on How George Lucas destroyed the British toy industry. Steve had written a great story (which he read from a music stand) that told how George Lucas’ master stroke at getting merchandising rights not only made him a billionaire it started the downfall of great British toys.

The final session contained my speaking slot. I was second on and I have no memory of the person before me as he spoke at a lightning pace and, ever the optimist, my thoughts traversed the spectrum of what could go wrong with my own talk. As I was introduced on stage as a banker from HSBC I expected the odd pantomime boo but thankfully not, all I received was warm applause. The talk passed by in a blur. I had difficulty looking at the screen in front of me instead opting for the one behind leading me to turn around like an idiot for the first few slides. I remember forgetting one key line around slide 6 which seemed to take an eternity to pass to slide 7 (15 seconds is a strange element of time when stood in front of a few hundred people). I also remember getting a laugh/groan for my exceptional slide on APIs (see below). It think it went ok in the end (I even got a few nice tweets) and the sense of relief as I came off stage was immense.

I could now fully enjoy the final 4 speakers which was fantastic as two of them were in my opinion the best of the night. Firstly Leila Johnston of ShiftRunStop fame, talked about making things quickly. Leila’s talk resonated very strongly with the work I do and I will be ensuring lots of people internally see the video once it is posted. Leila had 3 rules.

1 – Stop Caring, about the past, the future and perfection. Leila mocked those who ‘Were the first bloggers’ or ‘Who had the idea for Twitter years before. Forget the past let it go. Make things fast to keep motivation levels high
2 – Stop Having Ambition. It just shows that you are not happy!
3 – Stop Making Claims. on your CV, on your blog etc. ‘All supplementary writing = distance’ as I type this I know I am doing wrong as I should be making things.

Really great talk and though Leila is lucky enough not to work in a large organisation I feel the lessons in her talk are applicable to all. Until the video is posted you can enjoy Leila’s slides in all their animated glory, including a great use of the flame transition, over here.

The final talk of the night was by geek comedian Tom Scott. His previous Ignite talk about a near future flash mob scenario is the second most viewed Ignite talk of all time garnering around 225,000 views. It is well worth a watch (stating the obvious). For his talk this time he used similar subject material but instead of highlighting the speed at which connections can be made and events can unfold powered by the web he looked at the wealth of public data available on social networking sites and the speed and ease at which they can be accessed. The slides/display was generated in realtime (sort of) pulling personal data from Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. Addresses and phone numbers came flooding by on the screen like an endless stream of user stupidity/naivety. I won’t spoil the payoff of the talk but it was very impressive and lead to me posting this ever so eloquent tweet. And that was that (well there was a visit to a curry house, when in Rome etc.) I had spoken in public, in front of strangers, about banking, and not been bottled. I had more importantly also attended a great event and been enlightened many times. A massive thanks to the organisers for such a fine event and a special mention to Richard for asking me to submit a talk.

My slides are embedded below and if you go to Slideshare you can see my script (that I loosely followed / mostly forgot) and I believe video will be arriving shortly (gulp) and you will be able to find them here when it does.

Can Silicon Valley disrupt banking? – IgniteLDN4

View more presentations from Aden Davies.

UPDATE: The video of my talk has finally been posted.

February 21, 2011 4 Comments

BarcampBank London 4

A few weeks ago I finally made it to a BarCampBank. These informal gatherings of banking geeks are held annually, in London and usually on a Saturday. Thankfully this years was on a Monday the day before Finovate.

which meant I was able to attend. The event was held at Nesta (The home of innovation apparently). The day was hosted by Dave Birch from Consult Hyperion and was sponsored by the Cabinet Office (and Consult Hyperion and Bullion Vault) who were very interested in alternative currencies and community funding, which gave the topics an interesting spin as well as introduce some different folk to the BarCampBank world. The format of the BarCamp is unconference so at the start of the day people post the topics they would like to discuss on a wall. These are then grouped together and themes identified.

Five breakout areas were defined and a session was held in each area. I attended 3 sessions, which were…

The potential impacts of NFC. A look at what is coming in the world of Near Field Communication. With the launch of the Nexus S by Google NFC is finally available in our stores and Apple are strongly rumoured to include NFC in the next iPhone and iPad. Will this be the start of a sea change in payments with tech companies getting increasingly involved? Or does control still rest with the payment networks and banks? This was quite a heated debate with people from O2, The GSMA, PayPal and other interested financial companies. Talk of Apple dominated the conversation to begin with. The general consensus was that they would not make a dent as it will be too expensive for retailers to upgrade their payments infrastructure for seemingly little benefit. I am not sure I agree with this as the cachet of being able to pay with your iPhone will be a great incentive in itself let alone the loyalty factors that could be involved.

What next for P2P business models. A very interesting panel which was dominated by representatives from P2P lending companies Zopa and FriendsClear. Giles the CEO of Zopa explained the complexities in starting a P2P lender. The ability to operate as a sort of mutual was hamstrung by the fact that considerable funding was required to get started so these companies will need relationships with traditional banks for quite some time. I asked a question of whether Facebook was a realistic competitor to Zopa but this was dismissed as the regulation requirements would be too onerous for them to even get started (rumours are that Facebook considered buying P2P lender Prosper in the US). I think if Facebook Credits gets a decent foothold we will certainly see them try something. We moved on from money to other forms of currency that could be traded P2P. Peoples time and effort were one and energy was the other future alternatives mentioned.

Time banks, where people are paid in units of time were a popular topic on the day. The example often rolled out was if someone in London cooked a lovely meal for the elderly parent of someone from Sheffield. Then the person in Sheffield could cook a meal for someone there. P2P networks at their most fundamental level. The creation of energy was also seen as a future tradable element. As solar panels and turbines become increasingly prevalent then it may become possible to offload unused energy to the grid for others in your community to use.

The importance of Identity. Another favourite topic of mine. The discussion around identity was probably the most lively of the three I attended. Topics ranged from the inevitable Banks as digital identity holders to the complexities of anonymous or partial identity management. The graphic example given was a frequenter of a fetish club whowould need to be identified in some form to attend while keeping there real world identity secret. They might also need some way of linking that anonymous identity to real world medical records should something go wrong. Like I said it was a lively debate.

With the conference being held the day before Finovate it meant quite a few people had flown in from around the world. This gave me a unique chance to meet some of the banking geeks I follow on Twitter in real life for the first time. This presents a tricky challenge though as you have to recognise people based on their 48×48 pixel avatar photo. I managed to meet up with Frederic Baud and John-Christophe Cavelli of Parisian based P2P lender FriendsClear, Yann Ranchere a financial tech blogger based out of New York as well as meeting up with previous acquaintances such as Brett King who had flown in from Singapore. I chatted, too briefly, with Dan Mullineux who is the creator of Money Toolkit and is apparently ‘Filling in where UK banks are failing to do mobile banking properly’ which is nice of him. Another interesting person was Rachel Sinha who is doing some lovel sounding visualisation work for the Chartered Institute of Accountants and is working with the godlike genius that is David McCandless. She was also baffled by the fact I was meeting people in real life that I only knew through Twitter. I also met someone from the company I work for, Tom Cannon, for the first time even though we had spoke, emailed and tweeted in the past. In the pub after the event I saw someone passing round dodgy but cool looking bank notes. It was Susan Steed from the New Economics Foundation who is involved in the Brixton Pounds local currency project and she kindly let me have some of the notes…not sure when I will be in Brixton next though.

11 Brixton Pounds

All in all a very thought provoking day and I met some very interesting people, well for bankers at least.

February 21, 2011 5 Comments

Can anthropormorphism help two factor authentication?

You know those lovely little calculator like devices that some banks use to help make your Internet Banking logon secure, do you enjoy using them? Do they make you feel happy? Are they a comforting security blanket? A necessary evil in the increasingly hacky/phishy world? Or are they yet another barrier to the easy access of your financial data? Or even worse a right pain in the backside? Different things to different people I suspect. My feelings on these devices fall somewhere between necessary evil and pain in the backside.

‘Those lovely little calculator like devices’ are known as two factor authentication devices. They allow you to generate a one time password (OTP) to help verify with your bank that you are who you say you are and that you are not some chancer half way round the globe that has worked out your normal logon and password. I was wondering if you could make these devices more enjoyable/tolerable by making them seem a bit more human or at the very least painting a smiley face on them complete with some wobbly eyes?

An article in Wired by Russell M. Davies kicked all this ‘thinking’ off. It tells the story of Russell buying a Sony Rolly, which is a small barrel shaped motorised speaker that can spin and flap in time to music, disappointingly it is not a robotic East End Poodle. As Russell explored using the device he found that it ‘…demonstrated to me that it takes only the slightest bit of pet-like or anthropomorphic behaviour from an object and we’re highly inclined to form a deep emotional bond with it.’ so the more human the device seems the more we are inclined to form a relationship with it. Some form a relationship so strong that they declare robots are nothing but heartbreak.

Speakers are not really a technology that is without love from consumers already but what about the vacuum cleaner? What was the effect on the relationship people had with those devices following the introduction of smiley faced bowler hat wearing Henry. Ben Terrett recently tried to find out who designed the face of Henry and as he looked into this he discovered a great quote ‘[The face was]…put there because the lonely cleaning armies of the early morning and late night liked to use an object they could address as a friend.’ As well as having a new friend did this addition of a face make the task of vacuuming more enjoyable/tolerable?

Of course making what is essentially a single function calculator compare on the cuteness scale with a dancing robot or a jolly red hoover is going to be difficult but small keychain size devices have in the past won over the hearts of a great number of people. Who remembers the Tamagotchi?

‘Make robots adorable and semi-useful and we’ll invite them into our lives faster than a Trojan horse in a meerkat suit’ Russell Davies

Unfortunately two form factor authentication devices are neither robots or invited. In a more fun world they would be both. Can you imagine a cute little dancing and spinning palm sized security access robokey? It would make a satisfying metallic unlocking sound when you generate the password or maybe a kerching or a warning cry of ‘do not go in there‘ in a comedy ‘I have just done an awful smelling excretion’ kind of way depending on the balance of your accounts. This would of course be prohibitively expensive but can you really calculate the ROI for bringing a bit of joy into peoples lives?

Please let someone build one of these dream security devices in the not too distant future or perhaps better yet come up with an alternative solution that makes a separate piece of hardware to log on to my online banking obsolete. On second thoughts that is complete madness.

February 3, 2011 2 Comments

Queuing For Machines

I was recently sat in St. Pancras enjoying a light ale while waiting for a train back to my home town of Sheffield. I was sat 10 yards from a bank of cash machines (I assume bank is the collective noun for ATMs) and during the 30 minutes I was sat there the queue for these machines never got shorter than 3. If I looked to my left I could see a block of four train ticket machines allowing travelers to buy tickets for immediate travel or to collect tickets they had previously ordered via the delightfully titled FastTicket, which had similar, if not longer queue lengths. A stream of seemingly never ending people waiting for pieces of paper and card to be dispatched by machines.

As I sat watching this scenario in between gawping at my smartphone I could not help but wonder why in the second decade of the second millennium people still had to queue for machines to dole out pieces of paper. I thought about how I felt when standing in those queues and those feelings usually involved disdain (come on what are you doing that takes this long? Do you really need to print a mini statement?), Annoyance (Why is there only 5 cash machines in this huge train station) and of course grumpiness (just because I am a miserable shit).

Now I know mobile ticketing solutions are on the horizon, from the 2D barcodes and QR codes for tickets to the future NFC technology solutions replacing both ticketing and eventually cash. These problems should not be with us much longer (well maybe a decade or so). These solutions cannot come fast enough for me.

We are trying to eradicate queues at all costs from the removal of physical cash to the redesigning of the car so that it is driver less and can in theory bring about the end of traffic jams (more a case of humans queuing in machines). So the days of long queues are seemingly coming to an end. We will be blessed with an easier life and more time to do exciting things (like gawping at smartphones). But then I began to think what will we lose if we no longer queue for these machines?

For a start the queue is a British tradition and we all love tradition so we may make our lives more stress free but a patriotic little part of us will die. We will have removed the awkward bonhomie between queue members. The knowing look between two queue members who both hate the idiot unable of retrieving a train ticket. No queues mean we have less frustration outlets. A lack of frustration outlets will create a tut and sigh surplus the likes of which the EU will have never seen. And what of the engineers? The real men and women whose mechanical engineering skills help keep these complex metal and plastic beasts spitting out rectangles of entitlement. Where will they go? Maybe they will go and make beautiful machines that people do not mind queuing for i.e. roller coasters. Or maybe they will build the kind of theme parks / interactive rides that Cory Doctorow describes in his excellent book Makers. And that is about as far as my sympathetic / reminiscent thoughts went.

For me the positives outweigh the negatives by quite a margin. Eliminating queues for these machines that are owned by organisations that the public have little love for may go a little way to healing old wounds, providing the solutions that replace them are slick and simple. Another plus point is that we will have removed a flash point from society. No longer will late night revellers risk the drunken lout at the back of the cash machine queue causing a ruckus or have to listen to a boorish conversation of a business dullard while he waits for his first class train ticket to the big city.

As I said before I cannot wait for the services that bring about the death of these machines and therefore the queues for them. Maybe then the smart technology companies can focus on improving / eradicating the scene of the most hated forms of queuing for machines. The Airport. Roll on teleportation.

January 12, 2011 4 Comments

Wee NFC

WARNING. This post contains a lot of talk about the passing of urine and is generally quite crude but in an innovative and ultimately charming way.

A few tweets have been pinging about today discussing the recent story of the new urinal games that Sega are trialling in Tokyo. These fantastic innovations in waste passing entertainment include such games as ‘Mannekin Pis’ a challenge to see how hard the urinal user can urinate. It then compares this to the previous urinal user to see who had the greatest velocity wee wee expulsion.

This lovely announcement was picked up on by all round fine fellow, Gregory Povey, who commented that they had made his flippancy. Greg was referring to a high brow discussion that Tim and James and I were lucky enough to be involved in, which took place in the summer of 2010.

The porcelain based parlance followed a talk at the LoveBytes event by Tobie Kerridge. Tobie talked about a project called Material Beliefs which amongst other things involved a prototype called Vital Signs which was a live bio monitoring device. The device involved the adhesion of digital plasters to the patients body to monitor the heart, breath and movement.

After the conference we retired to a local ale house to discuss what we had seen and heard. As the ale flowed we somehow got onto the topic of barely games. Now I don’t quite remember who (but I suspect it was me) mentioned urinal games i.e. the simplistic and usually advertising based, featuring such things as plastic football goals in the bowl.

Greg took this a stage further discussing the digital opportunities around these liquid excretion based frivolities and the social gaming potential they possessed. As the conversation flowed we stumbled back to the bio monitoring digital plasters. We also talked about Near Field Communication (NFC) and how the physical & digital world will become increasingly linked probably via the mobile. I may have said something about these plasters being able to attach to certain appendages and to maybe measure effluence flow rate, bladder capacity vs pints drunk (a useful measure in the manly challenge of seeing who can go the longest during a drinking session without going to the toilet) and then connect to the phone via NFC and use the functionality of the device to submit this very useful data to the cloud, GPS locate the piddler and other such useful recordings and measurements. James summed this up a bit more succinctly in his tweet the day after, which I must protest is without context and paints me in a terrible light, maybe even more terrible than this post.

So there you have it the story of the NFC based penis plaster which when I tweeted about today piqued quite a bit of interest from bemused tweeters. Emma Cooper asked if there was a ladies version. She then quickly tried to unask the question but it was too late. I think that it would be possible for ladies although the mechanics are more complex. I am also of the understanding that the female urinal is not quite a prevalent in society as the male version. Tony Kennick asked a quite crude question but also a very valid one, about if there was accompanying technology that could be used for orifices to record check ins. I suspect if the former invention were created the latter would surely follow.

So that is that. I have spent too much time thinking about this thing but enough people asked about it that I felt I had to explain myself. I am not sure how accurate my recollection of the original discussion is, Bernard Premium Strength Lager is quite strong, so if James, Tim or Greg would like to add or amend any of the details then please let me know. My final thought on the matter is the product name. The worse one I have come up with is iUrethra my favourite is Wee NFC. Any other product name suggestions greatly appreciated.

January 11, 2011 Add Comment

Interesting North

Saturday the 13th of November was a date I had been looking forward to for quite some time. This day saw the culmination of a lot of hard work by Tim Duckett, Greg Povey and a band of merry helpers that I was lucky enough to be one of. The hard work was to set up a conference in Sheffield based on the Interesting conference run in London. Interesting has been run since 2007 by the post digital god Russell Davies. Tim Duckett, an Interesting veteran, had the idea of transporting the concept to Sheffield and I suspect he did not really know how much work that idea would entail. Numerous planning meetings were held in local public houses and Chinese restaurants. Following these planning sessions lots of work was undertaken to get to this day. Saturday the 13th of November was the day Interesting North opened its doors to the lovely ticket buying audience.

The team had an early start with the majority of us arriving at 8am to set up the grand venue that we had chosen, Cutlers Hall. When I got there things were well underway with the AV all set up and the only thing for me to do was help with hanging some bunting and then get ready for registrations. I never knew how much hard work signing 250 people into an event was but let me tell you it was difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. Thankfully the rest of the day was being run by Tim and Greg with an efficient air so the good folk that did show up were not to be disappointed.

The plan was 20 talks, 2 coffee breaks and lunch all in just 7 hours. Ambitious? Foolish? Either way it represented great value for money for just twenty English pounds no matter what happened.

As much as would love to write about all 20 speakers I lack both the energy and skill required to do so. Instead here are a handful of my favourites.

The first talk I had earmarked as must see, was by Stefanie Posavec. I first became aware of Stefanie’s work a few years ago when I came across her lovely visualisations of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Her talk for Interesting North was on Baseball Scoring. Stefanie bravely asserted that Baseball was better then Cricket (she is of course wrong) but did recover by telling us that an English man made Baseball the sport it is today by introducing peanuts and beer. Stefanie explained the intricacies, differences and notations used in Baseball scoring. It was clear that she was passionate and emotionally linked to Baseball scoring as she admitted that she would only score the game in the same way her father does.

All round nice chap and black pudding fan, James Boardwell, asked ‘As we peddle more how might cities change’. Following a recent cycling accident where James was hit by a taxi and unsurprisingly came out worse. James wondered if the city could be made softer to benefit the cyclist rather than the car driver. He showed a fantastic automated bicycle parking machine from China, some amazing stunt cycling that made the most of how our cities were already laid out and he also got a little over excited on stage over bike porn.

James Wallis deserves a special mention for the funniest talk/list of the day with his fantastically titled session called ‘Works of Fiction with Really Stupid Titles Involving the National Socialist Government of Germany 1933-1945’ or to put it another way books with Nazi in the title. As someone who works for a bank my favourite was ‘Gnome: A young Swiss banker deals with the Nazis, He remains ambivalent’

Frankie Roberto had the tricky task of enlivening the crowd post lunch but he took it in his stride with a passionate talk about the joys of Lego. As well as showing a photo of his fantastically organised Lego collection (think lots of well labelled tupperwares) Frankie also covered the issues that the passionate community of AFOLs (Adult Fans Of Lego) spend a lot of time discussing such as the colour tone differences of new grey bricks, dodgy product tie ins e.g. Shell and the tricky issue of minifig skin colour.

Best game of the day was designed by Oli Shaw. Oli spent a year studying the behaviours of people who fall asleep on public transport. Oli has built up a splendid collection of photos of these sleepers. He told of, and showed, the innovative pillow usage, considerations of how to deal with your bags (hold on tight or be more nonchalant) and the contagious nature of the sleeper. As his studies progressed he began to add game mechanics to these photos assigning points for sleepers e.g. 1pts for a sleeper, 2pts for a unique sleeping position, 3pts for use of a real pillow and 10pts for capturing someone mid yawn.

As the sun set and the grand room began to darken the stage was perfectly set for Marcus Brown a.k.a. The Kaiser a.k.a. Jack The Twitter a.k.a. Sacrum. Mr Brown told a tale of how he had lost 12 days, ended up in a tent camping in a field even though he hates camping and does not own a tent. Following this he checked himself into a mental institution. The most engrossing and affecting talk of the day.

Last speaker of the day was Toby Barnes, MD of Mudlark. Toby is good friends with Greg but the fact he was on last and that it was at least an hour later than he was originally planned to go on meant that as he was being wired for sound he had some harsh and very amusing words for Greg which I can’t repeat here but that made me laugh a lot. A theme which continued through his talk. Toby told us of his love for the future with a special mention of modernist architecture. As a child growing up in in Portsmouth he would love to visit the, now sadly derelict, Tricorn shopping centre. The fact this futuristic concrete vision has now fell into disrepair highlights how we no longer have the desire to build and invent the future we were promised in the design, science fiction and future gazing of the past.

Toby was also concerned that the so called good guys in popular works of fiction such as James Bond and Star Wars were always blowing up really cool architecture e.g. Blofelds Volcano Lair and The Death Star. His other concern was that we have all these cool futuristic things today e.g. iPhones, and that we take them for granted. A point which he made by referencing Frank Chimero’s post ‘There is a horse in the Apple store’ which looks at how we take the extraordinary for granted. My poor usage of the English language really does not do his talk justice and hopefully the video of the talk will be online soon.

Once Toby had delivered his excellent yet depressing talk (I want the future we were promised as well) it was time for Tim to wrap up and get the rapturous applause his tireless work deserved. After that it was off to the pub for a well deserved pint or six and to finally get the chance to chat with the audience, speakers and fellow organisers.

I would like to add that it was an honour to be involved (although my contribution was minuscule) and I have to take my hat off to Tim for pulling this together. A truly amazing feat and I am so glad the day went as well as it did as he truly deserved it. Also a special mention for Greg who worked his own special blend of magic to make the event what it was all the while maintaining his dry caustic wit.

You can find out lots more about what went on at the Lanyrd page where we will collate all write ups, photos, videos and anything else we can post online. I have taken a few average quality photos and for some much better photos I strongly encourage you to check out Dan Sumption’s images of the day.

November 15, 2010 1 Comment

Hunch Cultivation Mechanisms

I recently watched Steven Johnson’s TED talk on where good ideas come from. Steven talks about how the coffee houses in England in the 1600s were fertile breeding grounds for good ideas. The smart and wise would meet to discuss the latest scientific theories or the political issues of the day and provide solutions to the worlds great problems. He jokes how innovation increased once ideas were discussed over stimulants rather than the previously heavily used depressants i.e. Gin, and while I don’t agree with this fully, I hate coffee, I can see his point.

Steven says that we need these kind of environments for ideas to grow and flourish and to quote another recent TED speaker, Matt Ridley, have sex. Have sex? Yes we want ideas to flirt, fornicate and reproduce. Organisations could do with some modern day coffee house equivalents or better yet idea nightclubs where cheap and easy ideas go to dance and look for lust (get your coat you hot idea you’ve pulled). Sure there will be a few morning after pills and a few trips to the GUM clinic but hopefully a few meaningful connections will be made as well.

Inside organisations these environments for stimulant fuelled idea discussions are few and far between. Sure they have canteens and maybe some other informal meeting spaces but the chances of getting the right people together in these spaces are slim. This is due to the usual reasons such as people are busy and the fact that in large organisations they work in vastly different geographic locations. The relatively new enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are still in their infancy so online hunch cultivating fields are not yet tilled. Maybe we need some more interesting analogue solutions, how about dry wipe boards on the back of toilet doors, the perfect space to think.

Outside the office environment it is much easier to connect ideas, to search out people to validate your hunch, as the big wide world more than likely contains people that think like you, where as the average sized company may not. The collaboration tools are also much more mature externally. Twitter, GitHub, Slideshare etc. allow you to sow those hunches and see if they germinate (metaphor being overworked like an arid patch of land).

For all the external environments benefits, for those that work in certain industries e.g. banks, the discussion of ideas outside the factory walls can have a disastrous effect on a persons career. Whether loose lipped individuals let innovative ideas slip in a real world coffee house or virtual coffee houses such as Twitter they are certainly skating on thin ice. Does this lack of ability to cultivate externally hamper the growth of these hunches?

How about some physical Hunch Cultivation Mechanisms? All these social collaboration tools are all well and good but why has the world not delivered us something that really can cultivate hunches? I am thinking something along the lines of everlasting gobstopper machine in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Instead of the machine spitting out gobstoppers it actually takes in your hunches (not sure how, may involve the transfer of bodily fluids) and spits (maybe that is the bodily fluid transfer method) out perfectly formed and delicious products/services/things of beauty.

Maybe it is more like The Matrix where a cable is plugged directly into your brain, or better yet your belly button as we all know the hunch is a gut feeling. Your hunch is transferred into the digital realm where it can instantly be filtered and matched against the millions of other hunches. The computed and digitally generated idea can then be faithfully reproduced in The Matrix complete with green hue to give it that Wachowski feel.

Not really sure where this is going so I better wrap up. The key hunch cultivation mechanism is a human being and the one who had the hunch in the first place but they do need tools to help them cultivate the hunch. I need a stiff drink to help me think about all this and not one made from ground coffee beans and hot water.

You can buy Steven’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and I have just taken delivery of it so I am hoping he has the answers to my questions above.

November 11, 2010 Add Comment

Socialising Expenditure

I have a theory that people would rather publicly discuss their intimate sexual liaisons than their finances. This is probably due to the fact their sexual antics are less embarrassing than their dirty financial secrets. For this reason I am very interested to see how socialised transaction services like Blippy and Swipely fare. These services give their users the privilege of publishing their expenditures on credit cards and at specific retailers such as iTunes and Amazon.

Now I personally think this is a great idea. As someone who is a huge fan of allowing data to be published, subscribed to and repurposed, the thought of a datafeed of my purchases is a fascinating one. But I also fail to see the point of these services existence, why do I need another social network just to publish what I have bought and talk about it? or am I missing the point? Are they just a layer that then posts the details out to my social networks of choice to share with my existing social graphs? Or do they add extra value? Either way there are issues. Firstly, I am very unlikely to to join a new social network just around buying stuff. Secondly, I would certainly want control over the types of things posted to my existing networks. Spamming my tweetstream with all my credit card purchases is unlikely to win me many fans (although I don’t have many now so it might not be an issue). Blippy does give you full manual control of what gets posted which is a big plus.

And my final, and key, issue with these services is that surely they can be replaced very easily by the retailers and the card companies? iTunes used Facebook connect in conjunction with its 12 days of Xmas Promotion and surely they will soon kiss and make up and join forces on Ping (which presents a real threat to these services). It does not take a great leap of imagination to see them publish my iTunes purchases to Facebook in the same way and cutting out the need for Blippy or Swipely. Amazon for example could also make the purchases I share on my network, affiliate links for me so I earn some money thus giving me greater incentives to share.

The issue of sharing data outwards is the same with the banks/cards providers, in theory it should be easy to set preferences to enable me to share my purchases from specific retailers with specific social networks or to just implement a simple share button so it can be done manually. But getting an API/feed of account transactions is something most banks do not offer at this moment in time (something I have mentioned previously…and will no doubt harp on about again and again).

The other problems these services have is peoples perception of sharing this kind of data. To those that say they will never share this data I say you may not but plenty will, also people already share this data today they just don’t do it via retailers, banks or services like Blippy. They tweet ‘Just bought…‘ or some variant of that sentiment. Also lots of people are using Blippy, sharing around $500,000 of purchases a day.

I think we will see lots more of this financial sharing in the future we already have purchases, we also have savings goals from SmartyPig. How long before we see Mortgage goals (I only have 10 years left to pay off). My stock portfolio just grew by 0.25%. My Kiva microloan just enabled someone to start a new life. Aden unlocked the ‘I just blew my overdraft’ badge.

I think these kinds of shared items are inevitable and they are just more pieces of the database of intentions, as detailed by John Batelle. The use case for all these shared items is still not fully understood and at the moment they are little more than ‘look at me’ or the equivalent of broadcast marketing. That being said they point to wider trends and I believe in the future that those that share the most will benefit the most. On the other hand we all know that those people who overshare and fill their Twitter feeds with more noise than signal from automated services are quickly unfollowed. Are we getting to the point where we need dual twitter feeds? One designed for automated outputs that can be picked up by other automated processes? This might work well for all those tweeting devices we will have when the internet of things takes off.

I am watching this space with great interest. I don’t think it will be long before the sharing of financial goals, activities and interests is commonplace. When that happens it is also inevitable that sexual and financial taboos will meet head on and we will see people share how much they spent at Coco de Mer, proudly on their Facebook pages and Tweet streams.

October 20, 2010 Add Comment

Internet Identity Workshop – Europe

I recently attended the Internet Identity Workshop. An event organised by members of the Identity Commons, which bring together decentralised identity evangelists hence their creation of these sessions in a number of locations around the world. My knowledge of this subject is limited at best but I am very interested in learning more because I agree wholeheartedly with the principles and desires of this group. It is worth noting I was a little apprehensive about attending this conference due to my previously mentioned lack of knowledge, which lead to a bit of late night revision prior to attendance.

The day began with me trying to find my way to the venue (Macmillan Hall in the University of London) from my hotel (the Radisson Grafton). Even though it was only a mile from the hotel and I was equipped with a GPS enabled iPhone it still took a lot of wandering around the University College of London (the college bit makes a big difference as it is the wrong location) before I found where I as meant to be. Once I finally found the University of London and Macmillan Hall I registered, gathered my credentials and headed in to the venue. The room for the event was marble clad with high ceilings. The room was dotted with carpeted panels to try and dampen sound reflections (they failed). The chairs were laid out in two concentric circles. I shuffled in, grabbed a drink, found a seat in the outer ring and opened my laptop. It is also worth noting I am awful at networking. I find it very difficult for some reason, to wander up to strangers, at an event that you have both paid money to attend so clearly have common ground to talk about, and introduce myself. Also the early arrivals at the conference were all middle aged males who looked like they spent a lot of time in front of computers. I realised I needn’t have worried about fitting in.

Things finally kicked off at 9.30 with organisers and facilitators for the day, Kaliya Hamlin (also known aptly as Identity Woman) and Heidi Nobantu Saul. Kaliya explained the reasons behind this meeting of minds (essentially make online identity better) and the format of the day, unconference. Heidi ran through the logistics of the day including the rules and expectations of the day e.g. If you are not learning or contributing feel free to fly between sessions like a butterfly and if someone mentions a TLA (three letter acronym) or something you don’t understand pause and ask them to explain.

There was then a series of intros where everyone in the room stood up and said a few sentences about themselves (always nerve wracking). Then came the session creation. A4 paper, coloured pens and anyone who wanted to create a session got writing. Upon completion we had 31 sessions covering all manner of ID related geekiness. Tech protocols/concepts such as WebID & DNSSSEC, privacy levels, tiered ID providers, European equivalents to NSTIC and finally ending up with digital death. Session slots were chosen, similar topics were merged and my own personal agenda became pretty evident.

Session 1 – Mydex Personal Datastore Announcement. One of the recurring themes of the day was around personal data stores. These are, in the words of Mydex.

‘Personal Data Stores are designed to restore to individuals control over the management and sharing of their personal data online.’

A key piece in the move to Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), Personal Datastores (PDS) provide a framework for users to store, manage and utilise their data rather than the multitude of companies that do so today. Mydex announced their pilot PDS. They have signed up a number of relying parties including councils (Croydon and Brent were mentioned), the DWP, Yougov etc. For a much richer description then why not listen to William Heath from Mydex tell you more about it. Very interesting looking service and I managed to have a few chats with the creators of it and they happened to mention that they had interest from a few banks. I wonder if Sheffield Council will be interested?

Session 2 – WEBID & DNSSEC. Thankfully two of the five sessions for this time slot got merged into one. Even more thankfully they were the ones I wanted to attend (in hindsight I may have been wrong). First up was Henry Story to talk about WebID (formerly known as the less snappy FOAF & SSL). Henry whizzed through a set of slides, that at normal pace I might have understood a bit more clearly. The basic principles (I think) behind WEBID are the concept of you have a specific URI for your ID which can be checked as part of the logon to services. The logon process is dealt with during the actual web page request using existing protocols HTTP and TLS. The other element involves the authorising site to request a WEBID certificate from the user. This very manual step in the demo kind of killed things for me and until we have active agents in browsers it will be unusable for most users. I really can see the potential in this tech (discoverability, federated nature of the ID) and I really liked the mention of using this built into crypto USB sticks for physical device logons. But work is required to make idiots like me understand and therefore use it.

I had struggled a bit with the first half of the session the second half just killed me. DNSSEC is, according to the idle mans research source ‘It is a set of extensions to DNS which provide to DNS clients (resolvers) origin authentication of DNS data, authenticated denial of existence, and data integrity, but not availability or confidentiality.’ I can see how this could help with some of the request steps of WEBID. Unfortunately the topic was presented with no slides or pretty pictures and such a complex and dry subject left me reaching for my laptop to see what else was going on.

Lunch = Chicken Massaman curry and a chat with some nice people from Vodafone R&D project, One Social Web. More on that in Session 4…

Session 3 – Project Nori Demonstration. Project Nori is an open source, open standards compliant personal data store. This gives users the ability to create their own datastores on their own servers. This hands control of your data back to you….assuming you are smart enough to set up your own datastore. Markus Sabadello, one of the creators of Nori, gave two demos of the technology. The first showing its potential as a datastore and how you would interact with services online. He used the example of ordering a Pizza. No need to fill out your address details when ordering online you click a button it goes to your PDS and returns the requested fields. I asked if this should be two way i.e. should I store my order history with the company on my PDS. In future when I interact with them I can show them what I have bought in the past and they could market to me accordingly (free garlic bread for you as you eat here every week). The current implementation does not deal with two way data passing but will do in the future. This conversation thread lead to a long discussion on data schemas required to store all the potential data (Mmm Pizza Data Schema) which it was widely agreed would require some standard schemas to be created.

The second demo showed Nori operating as a node in a federated social network. The example showed how it could be set up to send, receive and store messages as part of a Status.net (open source microblogging platform) federated install. Very cool geeky stuff. You can see both demos in action on the Project Nori site

Session 4 – One Social Web & W3C Social Web Proposal. Another 2 for 1 session comprising a demo of the Vodafone One Social Web (OSW) project and a discussion around the W3C proposals for the federated social web. The One Social Web project is looking to build a truly federated social network built on open standards (XMPP, Activitystreams, vCard etc.) and aiming to destroy the walled gardens of existing social networks. Daniel Applequist demonstrated the system by sending messages between multiple users who have their own OSW instances but on completely different servers. The demo while impressive to a geek like me also showed some of the flaws in this decentralised method in that one of the users Daniel tried to talk with could not receive a message because his server was down. Having said that, if it was a centralised system then had the one server been down no one could use the system. What all this means is that if you have friends on one social network they are no different to friends on another social network. You can talk to them in the same way, share things with them in the same way. The analogy given was the telephone lets you call anyone. Facebook users can’t share a tagged photo with Myspace users. The code is available now on Github if you care to run up your own instance of OSW.

It is the federated concepts behind OSW that are driving the thinking behind the W3C proposal. Daniel, in conjunction with others, has produced a report on the direction of the federated social web

‘…the Social Web should allow people to create networks of relationships across the entire Web, while giving people the ability to control their own privacy and data.’

Harry Halpin (the editor of the report and spit double of Jason Lee, see photo below) made a passionate plea for these open and federated technologies to shape the way existing social networks operate. As well as the report they have also created the first Social Web Acid Test (SWAT0). The test has just six seemingly simple steps:

1. With his phone, Dave takes a photo of Tantek and uploads it using a service
2. Dave tags the photo with Tantek
3. Tantek gets a notification on another service that he’s been tagged in a photo
4. Evan, who is subscribed to Dave, sees the photo on yet another service
5. Evan comments on the photo
6. David and Tantek receive notifications that Evan has commented on the photo

By about step 3 or 4 you would kill any of the main social services in play today. Elements of the technologies mentioned in the report are in play for some social networks e.g. Facebook utilise Activitystreams but true interoperability is a long way off. The purpose of the report is to try and get the W3C to standardise these building blocks in the same way that they have with things like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Harry mentioned that previous attempts by the W3C to build standards for this had been poor e.g. POWDER but he hoped protocols that had been built by others could prove more successful. For anyone interested in the future of the social web I highly recommend reading the report.

Harry on the Left, Jason on the right...I think

Session 5 – Personal Data Ecosystem. The last session of the day and it was back to a topic I knew little about before today, Personal DataStores, but by the end of it I knew a little bit more. Lead by conference organiser, Kaliya, it was more discussion based than the previous sessions I had attended which were more presentation based. The discussion revolved around the concept of the PDS and whether they can become a viable and well used device coupled with sustainable business models. Kaliya picked on me first asking how could banks use this type of technology? My personal opinion is that while banks will certainly be a major contributor to these data stores in the future today the regulatory issues around holding and transferring banking data would make early involvement very complex. David Alexander of Mydex explained some of the business models and benefits they are using to sell their system. Primarily the transfer of data storage and retrieval costs to the customer (or 3rd party data store handler) represented major savings costs for organisations. For banks I am pretty sure they would never be able to simply hand over all data to their customers and not store any for themselves so the savings would not be there. But I can certainly see lots of uses from a customer point of view.

I think the only way these datastores will take off is if major retailers such as Amazon get behind them. They must deliver new value to the users and they must present a more usable experience that what exists today i.e. remove incessant registration form filling. Please read Kaliya’s thoughts on Personal Data Stores and also keep an eye on the Personal Data Ecosystem site for more developments in this interesting space.

In conclusion, the day really exceeded my expectations, my initial trepidation at being completely out of my depth was misplaced as it turns out I know just enough about this subject to wing it. It was also not an issue because everyone there was very friendly and always willing to explain in more detail anything that was not clear. Only downside would be the room, as the marble walls (even with tasteful carpeted panels) and high ceilings meant that it was very noisy and sometimes difficult to follow conversations in your own session. I enjoyed the day and learnt a hell of a lot that I will have to spend quite some time trying to shuffle round in my head into something I can take forward. You could say I need a personal Internet identity workshop knowledge data store….Identity based humour is clearly the future.

October 13, 2010 Add Comment