Category: Articles

DellB2B: A Day of Three Parts

Two weeks ago I was invited to the latest Dell B2B huddle. The event was organised by Kerry Bridge, community manager for Dell in the UK and Neville Hobson of FIR. This is the third of these events and I was lucky enough to attend the previous one.  The purpose of the day is to look at social media use for business to business. The day was split into 3 parts. First up was a small lunchtime roundtable which was held at the Thomas Cubbit in Victoria. Four people had been chosen to speak about the progress in social media from a business to business prospective. I was one of them, as were Ruben Govinden from Transport for London, Richard Robinson from Google and Thomas Power from Ecademy. A few journalists were also in attendance which meant I was a bit nervous about saying the wrong thing and leading to me being mocked in the press or even worse, sacked. The lunchtime chat was hosted/refereed by Stuart Handley the head of comms for Dell in Europe.  I won’t talk about what I said you can read about that on Silicon.com (the site that the journalist sat next to me was writing for). I have not been sacked yet so my words cannot have been too controversial.

Ruben Govinden from TFL spoke about how they used social media to deal with crisis comms situations and spoke about the infamous case of an employee who was caught on film being abusive about an elderly passenger. Social media had helped the story spread like wildfire it had also helped TFL contain the story. Ruben told how they had limited the effects of the story in a matter of hours, in relation to identifying the employee, but I got the feeling that consensus on the table was that as people knew exactly what the incident was it was a case of damage limitation. Either way is is an interesting use case and a stark reminder that everyone has a camera these days.

Thomas Power spoke about his company Ecademy and the difficulties they faced working with so many businesses. The business networking site has around 400k members. Ecademy are present on an ever growing number of sites and their members are all looking for help on these increasingly disparate and seemingly never ending platforms (sounds familiar).

Richard Robinson, Head of Business Markets at Google was also in attendance and he spoke of how social was changing everything.  I asked him, with tongue firmly in cheek, when they would build a really great Twitter search engine and whether or not they had any internal social media monitoring tools, or planned to get into the social media monitoring game (all 3 skillfully unanswered/denied). Having said that, the products they do have in place today are very good e.g. Google Realtime Search, Google Trends etc. I just want something that allows me to search every tweet ever and have the greatest social media dashboard ever created. Is that too much to expect of Google?

The second part of the day saw us head off round the corner to Google for a presentation and Q&A session with Brian Solis followed by 3 unconference sessions on B2B related topics. For those of you who are unaware of the work of Brian Solis then I urge you to check out his blog if you have any interest in social media and its wider implications for businesses.

Brian recently became part of the Altimeter group joining other social media luminaries such as Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang. Here he will focus more on the research side of his work, as he stated ‘Social Media is less about about technology and more about anthropology, psychology and sociology. It is all about human interaction’. Too many people forget this and concentrate on the shiny new thing. Brian gave an example from one such company that he had carried out research for and found a massive 89 mentions on Twitter. Brian found a lot more conversation about their brand on blogs and forums but they were seen as old fashioned and the company wanted a Twitter strategy not a social media one.

His recently revised book Engage covers just that, how companies must engage to remain relevant in the world of the social consumer. If you are not saying anything in social r not adding value to the conversations being held there then you cease to be part of the buying decision. The social consumer will not take the normal sales funnel route. If you are at all interested in social media usage for business to business (or customer) intereactions then I highly recommend taking a look at Brian’s slides and having a listen to his talk which Neville recorded and edited and is available here.

The unconference sessions passed by in a bit of a blur. I missed the first slot (I was chatting to Brian about if he had ever worked with banks, yes he had and he sympathised with me about the complexities involved) but the two I did attend on influence and what it really means, hosted by Luke Brynley-Jones, and digital DNA a look at how growing up digital is altering how the next generations view the world by Andy Piper of IBM were very interesting. The session on influence looked at how social capital is now coming into play with people’s interactions with companies. Awful things like Klout score and peer index rankings are getting certain customers extra perks. I suggested a mortgage linked to your Klout score (the higher the Klout score the lower the mortgage rate). I said that I thought it was a terrible idea but it made for an interesting discussion and a couple of people thought it was a good idea!

Andy’s digital DNA session was a quickfire look at the impacts of growing up as a digital native. He referenced Don Tapscott’s book Growing Up Digital which details how his kids have grown up in a digital age and how he sees that has altered there development compared to his own growing up analogue. An interesting discussion followed around the perception of all Gen Y/Gen 0 etc. being tech savvy but that was not the case. We also had a little chat about white washing, which is where kids are deactivating their Facebook accounts when they are not logged on to prevent anyone from tagging them or making a comment on any of their content while they are offline. Privacy awareness at work.

The third and final part of the day was a ‘Tweetup’ and as it was St Patrick’s Day it seems only right that it was held in a pub and that the pub had a pretty generous free bar tab. It gave me a chance to have a chat with a few people that I follow on Twitter but have never met in real life. Alan Schoenberg who works for the CME Group and is an active financial services Twitter user (a rare but compelling breed).  The aforementioned Andy Piper who is an interesting character from IBM, as well as his day job looking at exciting things like MQ he also creates the Dogear nation podcast as well as being one of their key social advocates. James Whatley of 1000 heads, is a mobile guru and is also doing some interesting work on social CRM. Last but not least was Gabrielle Laine-Peters who had just returned from 3 months in South Africa where she had driven 1300km on her own, swum with penguins and managed to bill a winery for teaching them how to use Tweetdeck, clearly I am in the wrong job.

The event was a very interesting, thought provoking and inspiring (and a little bit of nerve racking) day. Thanks again to Kerry for inviting me and I am really looking forward to the next one. Assuming I am lucky enough to be invited.

Thanks to Benjamin Ellis of redcatco and SocialOptic for allowing me to use his fine photo. You can see more photos of the event by viewing the DellB2B tag on Flickr (Including one of me with a beer in my hand and wearing a green garland…it is called networking I believe)

April 4, 2011 Add Comment

A bank geek goes to The Story

A telephone bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bedsprings creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said: “Awreight pal, Taxi’s ‘ere.” (Apologies to Dashiell Hammett for the blatant plagiarism/vandalism)

Friday the 18th of February meant I was awake early for the journey from Sheffield to London to attend The Story. For those unaware The Story is a one day conference about stories and story telling.  I think you will all agree this is something that a banking innovation geek should be attending. If not, let me tell you the tale of the day and try and convince you otherwise.

First up were Ben & Lucy from the Ministry of Stories. They told the tale of the Monster supply shop in Hoxton. Selling fantastic goods for all your monster needs.  The shop is a front though. For something great. The back of the store hides a room used to help kids write creatively. They run free work shops to encourage them to tell marvelous tales and ensure their fertile imaginations are not destroyed by dull things like school.  They are run by local volunteering writers, artists and teachers.  Inspired by the work of Dave Eggers in the US, I found what they were doing to be truly fantastic.  At the end of the talk a little creative exercise was tried. The crowd had to design a monster. Lucy would ask what a part of the monster would look like and how it would feel. People shouted out. The monsters description was written on screen. This was then going to be drawn during the day and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The results are at the bottom of this post. The process made me think of design by committee and how people just shouting things out lead to monsters being designed. The problem being that they did not set out to design a monster…

Adam Curtis of the BBC and the man responsible for the excellent Power of Nightmares documentary, told how the BBC were losing faith in the web as a means of telling stories. He went on to show a clip of an Afghani reporter interviewing a member of the Taliban. The clip showed the Taliban fighter admitting they had burnt down schools but only to stop the infidels doing so first. The short/soundbite clip formed part of a news package. The thing is the story behind the clip was far more interesting. It turned out the reporter had almost been killed by allied forces as they thought him to be a terrorist. he was actually a poet and had fled the Taliban. He became a reporter and was sent into the lions den with men he feared who also threatened to kill him. Adam played the full version of the clip. It showed the reporter asking more questions but you could now see he was visibly terrified. One of the reasons for his terror was that the other, very heavily armed, Taliban fighters were circling the camera (walking in front of shot) in a show of constant intimidation. Very powerful and far more engaging than the soundbite. I don’t have the ability to do justice to Adam’s talk. Check out Antony Mayfield’s much more detailed piece to get a better sense of what he said. The thing I took away though was that giving context to the story is very very important. Sound bites and copy written pieces offer no engagement no sense of awe. That is something that needs to be addressed. How do we add context to our stories? How do we let people delve deeper?

For me the the most effecting talk of the day was by Karl James. He confessed upfront that he was not a story teller just a listener, a facilitator of stories. He explained, with the help of some very powerful audio clips, how people that can truly listen allow people to become more articulate about the story than they ever would for a poor listener. Listening helps them to open up and expand. There was the story of Jane a 38 year old woman who had been raped at the age of 14. She had not let herself become her story but had grown because of it. She was strong, confident but through listening Karl had got to previously unheard elements of the story. As the clip played and Karl quizzed Mary on how it had affected her and then how it affected her family it became clear that the thing she had really lost was her brother who had ceased to be part of the family.

Original Photo by Toby Barnes

Next up was Chris a friend of Karl’s and the father of a young daughter who had become very ill. Karl asked the question ‘What do you wish you had known on day one of finding out your daughter was ill?’ following the question a long pause followed, all that were heard were the noises of thought as Chris tried to pull together an answer. The pause between the question and answer lasted 19 seconds, Karl told us after. That 19 seconds was a long time. A few hundred people in Conway Hall awaited the answer in rapt silence. As a recent father that 19 seconds allowed my thoughts to wander to places I did not want them to go. How would I answer such a question? Would I ever want to be in the position to be asked that question? When Chris finally answered he said that he would tell himself that you can not deal with this alone. You could hear and feel the huge burden he had been subjected to. I was very thankful that it had not been me.

I was not sure how much more I could take of this. Karl began to talk about children at a central London school. I thought if these next clips were about child abuse I would have to make my excuses and leave (‘Something in my eye, *cough cough* must get a drink etc.). Thankfully they were not but were interviews with so called problem kids and how they were totally disengaged from school life. How they had no respect for people who had no respect for them. In the end it was about child abuse just not the kind I worriedly expected but none the less it still had an effect on me. I would highly recommend you take a look at Karl’s slides and listen to the audio of his talk to hear for yourself and see if you agree with me or think I am just a soppy new dad! It certainly made me think about my own listening skills and how they could be so much better. What would the impact be if everyone was such a good listener?

The headline act of the day was creator of Father Ted and the IT Crowd, Graham Linehan. He was interviewed by geek author and copyfighter Cory Doctorow. Graham is a heavy user of Twitter and he has recently started writing with 7 or 8 people he found funny on there. Graham had used to Twitter to facilitate rewrites during filming he gave the example of calling out to his Twitter followers to come up with a term for ‘backside’ that they could use on the show. Bike rack was the one he chose. He was trialling new tools to see if web 2.0 could facilitate collaborative writing. He was using Basecamp to allow the 7 or 8 people from Twitter who were based around the globe to work together on writing a sitcom (global collaboration in action). Some things had worked well others not so much so it was still a work in progress.

Original Photo by Matt Ward

Graham talked of how he was trying ‘systematise goofing off’. Spending hours on social networks can justifiably be called research when you write a sitcom about I.T. Geeks. Graham did have systems in place though. He spoke of his old system of lots of coloured cards filled with stories ideas or situations.  They were colour coded based on character the situation related to. He would set them out on the floor and try to pull together and link the story elements. The internet had unsurprisingly proved a rich vein of situations that could befall Moss, Roy and Jenny. He did a quick bit of Googling and found his favourite photo of all time from the classic, Awkward Pet Photos. He posted the photo to Basecamp and said too his writing colleagues how can we get Roy into the situation? Know where you want to get to. Then find the way there. If only more creative projects stared this way. Especially with guidance from Awkward Family Pet Photos.

The Story was not like the normal conferences I go to. It was all the better for it. I like to attend conferences that stretch my mind and change my thinking. I like conferences that have side stories.  That inspire new forms of story telling. All the while thinking how can I relate this back to the work I do. The story succeeded massively on that front for me.  If you work on Innovation, irrespective of the industry, then getting out of your comfort zone and going to something a bit left field can help expand your thinking greatly. A big thanks to Matt Locke and all the organisers of a fantastic day. Looking forward to the Story 2012…it sounds like a futuristic one. Finally here is the monster that was created on the day and the description (specification?) that defined how it might look.

The photo and description was taken from from JulieBee’s excellent post

March 29, 2011 Add Comment

Seeing ‘my’ ideas in print

Nothing beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. Plenty beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. by someone else. Of course your idea is an idea that could have been had by lots of other people but when you have that idea you feel special. You are sure it is a good idea. You are sure it is an innovative idea. When someone else writes it down first you are now very sure it is a good idea.

Of course I am not vain enough to think that I had this idea first. Most, if not all, ideas will be had by more than one person at around the same time. Steven B. Johnson covers ‘idea multiples in his book where good ideas come from. He explains

‘A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year’

For example sun spots were discovered in 1611 by four scientists in four different countries completely independently. My idea is far from the discovery of sun spots.

As you can guess this happened to me recently. I have had this idea in my head for well over a year. I have had grand plans on how to visualise and sell this idea but I have just not got round to doing it. The value of ideas in your head is zero. In fact it is probably a negative number as thoughts in your head occupy areas of your mind, use up valuable processing time and generally get in the way of other stuff.

 

Idea in head =  -£10

Idea written on fag packet = £10

Idea published for others to see = £20

 

I think Brendan Dawes put it best in his great print, which you can buy here.

I wonder if Brendan fancies doing another version that reads ‘Thought – Action = Dumb Shit’ or something like that.

Once the idea is out of your head. It has the chance to evolve and be refined. It can be shared with others to get the idea validated and enhanced (or mocked). It means the idea has a chance of becoming more than just an idea.

The idea in question was written, visualised and published by an agency working with the company I work for. I would love to say what the idea is but I can’t. After getting over the disappointment of not being the one to come up with (or publish it first) this brilliant, in my humble opinion, idea I now feel a need to evangelise this idea and to ensure it is not crushed by the design by committee types or overlooked as just a feature that can be dropped.

The fact it was written, visualised, published by someone external to my company, that have been paid to come up with ideas, might actually help the idea because sometimes external expertise is treated with higher regard, and in this case rightly so. I am not bothered about getting credit for ideas I just want to see ideas that I think are good get built.

The moral of the story is get ideas out of your head. Write them down somewhere. Draw a picture. What ever way you want to represent them. Just do it. Now. Don’t be a dumb shit.

Thanks to Chris Dymond for helping me find the page in Steven’s book featuring Idea Multiples.

March 21, 2011 1 Comment

I just can’t help myself

I have a very dull confession to make. I love playing those lovely little hashtag games on Twitter. You know the ones. Where someone takes a category of culture e.g. film, book, song, band, celebrity and then adds something to the mix such as a witty satirical angle or just links to food or booze.

So you get a random group of people coming up with something very(?) amusing as shown above.  I am not sure why I am so drawn to these things? I think the reason is that I like the little mental challenge they present. They also provide a little moment of joy. They are essentially a task to combine two pieces of existing information that you have e.g. a celebrity name and something related to alcohol, and come up with something new and preferably funny. As you can see from the screen shots I am also not that good at them.

They offer up a little bit of lateral thinking to exercise the connection of neurons.  I wish their were more banking related ones although I can imagine that would quickly descend into banker bashing territory (it is where the laughs are though).  I remember Chris Skinner doing a post which had a banking crisis and films mixed together type list. I even submitted my own rip roaringly funny suggestion of ‘A few dud men’.

What I would also like is someway of replicating a similar thing inside my place of work. A well populated and well used Twitteresque network would make things a bit easier…maybe one day, but I am sure it would work.  Start off playing for fun using project/product names and food to create hilarity. Segue sneakily into making them work related by trying to get people to join two ideas around a central theme to make an innovative (or funny) idea? Yes I agree it is a long shot and I am beginning to think this post is just a vague attempt to justify the time I spend playing hashtag games.  #BankerPlayingGamesJustificationFilms Go…

March 2, 2011 Add Comment

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