Articles – Page 8

Tweetbot: Fix these things and I will love you more.

I recently switched from the official Twitter app for iPhone to, the highly recommended by several of my friends, Tweetbot. I have to say I am very happy with it apart from a couple of things that I would love them to fix. They are fairly minor in my mind but I know app development is never straight forward.

I spend quite a lot of time on trains. These high speed (?) rail bound metal tubes are not renowned for their high quality 3G signal in the UK. Trying to catch up on tweets is quite complex when you have patchy signal. I grab 200 tweets from the API at every signal opportunity to give me something to read. I use the favourite option to mark things to read later. While on a train trying to open a web page (even in the excellent readability mode on Tweetbot) is next to pointless and wastes a squirt of precious 3G connectivity. Tweetbot will not let you mark a favourite in Twitter while you have no signal. For the screenshots in this post I have set the phone to aeroplane mode to demo no signal before any smart asses say anything.

This is a better situation than the official iPhone app which tells you it has favourited them but when you go to your favourites when you are back in a high signal area you find this was a lie (on of the main reasons I switched to Tweetbot.

Why can’t I mark a favourite while I am offline?

I see it working like this. Mark the tweet as favourite as normal. Get a message saying the tweet has been favourited in offline mode and will be updated when a data signal is available. The app could either attempt when a signal does become available or perhaps move the requests to a folder in a similar fashion to the drafts folder. I can then see what I have attempted to favourite and reattempt to save them.

Favourite Fail

Surely capturing the favourite is as simple as storing a draft unsent tweet? Just store the Tweet URL (Is this allowed in an app/from the API?) and then resubmit the favourite call. Or maybe the app could even offer other options for what to do with the interesting URL within the tweet but the main thing for me is the ability to store interesting links when I am offline…but I digress. The only solution I have today is cut and paste into something else or take a screenshot. Not great.

Why is there no visible notifications that I have unsent draft tweets?

Another downside of train travel is sending tweets when you have little or no signal. If it is unable to post Tweetbot will display an error then give you the chance to save or discard the draft. The problem being that someone forgetful like me will do something else and forget to send the tweet which was probably a reply to someone. Even if I go back later to tweet something there is no indication that drafts exist. The next time I find out I have drafts unsent is usually next time I am on a train and I have sent some tweets to the drafts folder and I do remember to resend and I find a bunch of replies from another time / day. Mildly annoying.

You only see drafts in the settings menu. I want a notifier please.

All I think is need is some sort of visual indicator on the compose tweet screen. Maybe a very simple red circle with a number in it, like the iphone notification number display, on the Tweet settings button. A simple reminder for the forgetful idiot, signal poor tweeter.

If you could fix these things Tweetbot I will love you more. Thanks in advance.

April 27, 2012 Add Comment

Banking in the ‘Glocal’ world

This awkwardly titled post is thusly titled because it is the name of an event that Betony Taylor, my esteemed colleague from the UK media relations team, and I were invited to speak at recently. The event took place in Zurich at the Swiss Stock Exchange and was hosted by Capco and the Swiss Finance Institute.

The venue for the day

The term Glocal (a portmanteux of Global and Local) is not just some awful marketing creation but is actually the basis of some detailed geographic research. The event was looking at the challenges being faced by banks due to the increasingly global nature of their customers through travel, the virtual erasure of borders through the use of the web and the realtime access demands due to the rise of mobile technologies.

The day started with a keynote from Peter Stringham of Young & Rubicam, and as it turned out he was also ex HSBC. His firm had undertaken a large piece of research into trust in industries. As you might expect the traditional retail and service industries had seen a huge decrease in consumer trust and the web based companies were seeing a great increase in trust. Peter’s research pointed to the fact that people just did not believe the messages coming out of those so called old world industries. I would like to see the research to dig into it a bit deeper but I have a feeling that people trust the big web companies more because what they do just works. They keep it simple.

The Occupy movement has been a big wake up for the financial industry. It is not just the normal protestors. Peter showed an image of a child protester to make the point that this will affect generations and how they think about banking. Recovering that trust could take generations. This lack of trust makes people want to disntermediate the system.

An Occupy site just yards from the event

One example given was payments startup Dwolla. They want to do payments without touching the traditional bank network as much as possible. If banks continue to fight and defend against the Internet as people will try and disintermediate the bank network.

Peter also discussed the lack of cross border identity, even between so called global institutions. He mentioned Amex being particularly painful to deal with when he moved from Canada to the US. They explained that he was a customer of Amex Canada. He felt it was strange how they don’t brand like that. He moved to the US and had sold a house for ‘several million dollars’ yet had no credit rating in the US (at this point I of course had very little sympathy for him but I agree there is a problem). These problems are caused by regulations and a lack of really understanding the customer need. The companies that can best unsnarl the regulation will be the ones that win. Consumers don’t care about regulation, they care about being able to do what they need to get done. A great start to a day I was worried would be way over my head. It allayed my fears, albeit briefly.

The first panel focused on reputation management and followed on nicely from Peter’s talk. The general attitude seemed to be that the banks had taken their eye off the ball and the blind pursuit of money had cost them dear. They knew they had to engage at a more human level to regain what they had lost.

The second and third panels were way over my head the second panel was also way over my personal wealth. They looked at the future of cross border private banking and the regulatory environment and its effect on the Eurozone crisis. I will be honest, I did not understand a lot of what was said for about 90 minutes. I have looked back at the presentations and discussions and I am still none the wiser.

What those panels did however do is remind me of the scale, importance and complexity of the financial system. I tend to forget how big banking really is and there is nothing like a session on macro prudential regulation in relation to cross border private banking to make you think your obsession with this piddling little social media stuff might just be the banking equivalent of a child’s toy.

Are the banks stuck between a rock and a...

The panel Betony and I were involved in covered social media and new technologies (quelle surprise) It was preceded by a talk from Dan Marovitz of Buzzimi and once of Deutsche Bank. Entitled, Banking in the Digital Slipstream, it looked at how our actions on the web are ever increasing and as such so is the footprint of what we leave behind. This data is the new gold. Banks sit on an interesting set of this data that none of these web companies have access too yet. Are banks making the best use of it?

The panel discussion that followed covered these topics with a particular focus on transparency. How could the banks deal with the demands of social media and its incessant march against secrets. The consensus seemed that they had to adjust. My own point of view being that no longer can they hide behind complex business models and terms and conditions. I mentioned BankSimple CEO, Josh Reich, and his thought that banks make money by keeping their customers confused. I don’t believe they do that wilfully but I think that banks forget how complex banking is as they live in this bubble where they understand the terminology and the ins and outs. Amusingly no one in the room (except the panel members) had even heard of BankSimple so maybe I live in my own bubble as well.

On the wider topic of social media. I wanted to make clear that it is just a brand name. Just like web 2.0 before it and social business that follows it. It is just the evolving web, the twenty something year old all conquering web. We need to embrace it because it is starting to reach its true potential. Earlier in the day social media had a few mentions and there was some confusion with it being about popularity and celebrity. Peter Andre was mentioned as doing well in social media but banks will not. Rubbish. The question was asked earlier in the day of how many companies are on twitter. This is the wrong question, how many of your named people are allowed on twitter to represent your brand. It is not about pumping out news on your brand in a broadcast manner it is about being a human being and adding some value.

I would love to see HSBC economists on twitter but there is so much regulation around them that they can’t say anything. They probably can’t even tweet about having a ham sandwich for lunch because that might impact the wheat and pork belly futures markets.

The panel moderator, Nick Levy of Capco, threw in his next question about dumb pipes, as in are the banks destined to become just a layer of infrastructure. I have written about this topic recently and the experience on the panel made me finish that long held post. In short I think yes they will but this is not a bad thing.

The view from the panel...enthralled suit based audience

Throughout the day I kept thinking about the levels of complexity on banking and how the evolving web’s great power had been to simplify processes and business models which has led to the rise of these new trusted companies, while banking and its many regulatory bodies and the governments of the world continue to add layer upon layer of rules and restrictions. I kept thinking about Clay Shirky’s piece on the collapse of complex business models. It is a fairly obvious yet pessimistic correlation to make. Yet the big trusted web companies are now starting to face the same problems, as Google’s recent privacy policy issues show. As the web giants encroach further on the ‘real’ world then rules and regulation are sure to follow. Will the new trusted companies be the ones that can innovate around regulation? Or the ones that unsnarl it and challenge the so called dark matter? Will the digital footprint be increasingly understood by consumers and will they realise the power it wields and demand that they have sight and control over it?

I don’t think the digital pieces of infrastructure required to really replace any meaningful parts of the banking system exist today. Digital identity and the elements of trust, systems that can eradicate the ability to hide money in dodgy offshore havens or through complex derivatives built on top of mythical AAA rated bonds. Transparency, trust and simplicity are the things required for banking in a Glocal world but they are very, very difficult to create. Ultimately a lot of these discussions around new technologies and trends and how you need to behave come down to good old fashioned trust. The day had come full circle.

All the presentations from the day (apart from Peter’s keynote frustratingly) are available here. There are some videos presentations and panels, although thankfully not the one I was on. Thanks to Capco and the SFI for inviting Bee and I to speak. It was a complex thought provoking day that reminded me exactly how big banking is and how it maybe needs to learn how to be small again.

April 18, 2012 Add Comment

Please stop calling them dumb pipes

Lots of people recently seem to be warning about banks becoming dumb pipes. They say banks are destined to just become the wires. The hearts and minds of customers will be won by the masters of the web. The Googles and Amazons and Apples and Paypals of the web 2.0 world. I agree they probably will but is it really a problem?

Those web 2.0 darlings are not going to make themselves into bank. The majority of them are just interested in the transaction data they don’t want the hassle of running a bank. Basel 3, MiFID and other impenetrable forms of regulation might not be too appealing.

Some may say (not me of course as I work for one) Banks have proved they don’t really get this web thing and especially not this web 2.0 thing with its rounded corners and nice fonts and helpful intuitive interfaces. Why not let the experts have a go at that bit while banks stick to what they are good at.

The banks operate a huge complex global network that moves trillions of dollars per day, usually without much issue. Complex fraud and anti-tax evasion systems operate silently. Audit requirements, data protection standards and a myriad of regulations make this system the powerful beast it is and also a potentially irreplaceable one.

No one in Silicon Valley or any other entrepreneur saturated dreamland is going to want to recreate the whole bank system (I have visions of mad stock sale billionaires from Facebook sitting in their volcano housed lairs thinking ‘we should do that’). That bank system may be a bit long in the tooth and may need some updates here and there but could we give it a chance to catch up by laying down some of these so called dumb pipes and bringing it closer to that other huge complex global network called the Internet? If we give a few more people access to the system in a web friendly way will it be of benefit to all? Will people realise the power of this network and what it allows us to do today?

Liz Lumley wrote a great post about SXSWi and how all the cool companies trying to disrupt banking are massively reliant on that network. ‘What struck me was the juxtaposition of the bravado coupled with the fairly shocking display of ignorance on how international banking and payments happen.’ These pipes are never going to be simple or dumb.

That being said I am interested in the most simple of these dumb pipes. I want an automated data feed from a current account. Every time a new transaction occurs I want a data feed I can subscribe to, just like RSS, to update. That feels very simple and you could say dumb but to make that happen is going to take some damn smart coding and some bravery.

The big problem is authentication. How do I prove I am who I say am? How do I prove that I am allowed to subscribe to that data feed? How does that authentication model satisfy banks security and fraud departments? How does it satisfy the regulators? What would happen if someone had access to all the data behind that API? What if the Daily Mail had access?

The most simple implementation of the so called dumb pipe was planted in my head by Dave Birch. He posted the following tweet.

Setup a private twitter account. Plug it into your bank account (this dumb pipe of course has OAuth/XAuth like qualities). Follow it to catch your transactions as they happen. Now a bank would never build this. No revenue at all. It only presents risk but a customer has asked for it (albeit a quite forward thinking one who would be a guinea pig to embed payments chip into his body) but a customer need is a customer need and we know they are always right.

A few examples i have seen during my time at HSBC where customers are trying to circumvent this lack of a subscription data feed. Designer Aral Balkan was none too happy that he could only manually access transaction data from two months in the past. So he built a tool (in under 4 days) to scrape the data and save it in a format for him to upload to Freeagent. Another person, a smart gentleman going by the name Jay Fresh, went a step further. He reverse engineered online banking to produce a command line interface. I spoke with him and asked him why, his reply was that he had simply wanted to build his own iPhone app. I can understand his frustrations. Should customers have to work so hard to do this? Should they have to risk their own logon data and potentially break terms and conditions to try and get to the data? Banks spend pots of cash each year trying to figure out what customers want, why not give them the tools to build what they want. A so called dumb pipe would be a very powerful tool in the right hands.

Mr Bank 2.0 (soon to be 2.1 and available in all good book stores), Brett King, also wrote a great post on this topic (and has been talking about it for years) arguing that if the banks do become merely an infrastructure layer then they will miss out on the value built on top of it and that we may need fewer banks/infrastructure providers. I agree they might and there could be less banks but do we need that infrastructure layer to be created to allow new value chains (ugh) and innovations to truly flourish? Where would we be if we still had a fragmented electricity system? Or you could only call someone on the same telephone network as you? We need to create these commodotised infrastructural layers and allow them to weave into the wider world (web?). The innovation S-Curves of many technologies have shown this pattern. Banks may resist as the wireless telcos are doing now, except for the smart ones such as Telefonica, but I believe there is an inevitability and the banks that embrace this will be the ones that exist…but I digress.

So what would a banks dumb pipe look like? What are the technologies required to keep this mother of all honey pots safe and secure so it does not spring a sticky leak. What would be needed to build the simple sounding dumb pipe detailed above? Yes there is inherent risk on freeing customer transaction data but I think the potential benefits outweigh the risks (I may be alone on this). We are starting to see some things in the French banking market that might answer these questions SDK’s have recently been released by Crédit Agricole and this week has also seen the launch of an API by Banque AXA. The future looks French.

I look forward to the arrival of the dumb pipe. It will bring together the banking system and the web. I have high hopes for this dumb pipe. People need to realise that the pipe is not so dumb.

March 21, 2012 14 Comments

BarCampBank London 5

The 6^th of February was the date for the 5^th BarCampBank London. Held at the same loation as last years, Nesta, it brought together around a hundred or so financial service innovation types to discuss the hot topics of the moment. Last year there had been a focus on alternative currencies and economies this year they were largely absent from the sessions (the ones I attended anyway). NFC was also another big topic last year but this year it felt like the disillusionment was setting in.

I was kindly asked by conference organiser Dave Birch to help group the themes from the post it note avalanche at the start of the BarCamp. It allowed me to be biased and shape a session on one of my current pet topics, APIs/Open Data, although to be honest I did not have to be that biased as it was a topic a lot of other people wanted to discuss.

‘What does a bank API look like?’ was the question used to frame the discussion. I was asked to lead the talk which was a tad daunting with some of the experts in the room thankfully I don’t think I made too much of an idiot of myself. The first job was to explain what an API was to the mixed knowledge group. An API is an Application Programming Interface and as the name implies it allows programs and services to connect and interact with it to control the business process it sits on top of. My primary focus is around creating APIs to deliver access to a customer’s transaction data so if they so desire they could use a third party PFM, like Mint.

But what is the business benefit of an API? Why would a bank open up its data to 3^rd parties when they can keep all that good stuff for themselves? Well the discussion coverd this quite a bit and the conclusion was that the biggest benefit is around internal development. The API should be used to build your own tools. If banks had APIs then building tablet, mobile or Internet Fridge banking apps would be a piece of cake.

Obviously the immediate concern when anyone mentions an API plugged into the financial transaction data of customers is what about the hackers?! Yes an API to financial data would be quite the honey pot but surely these issues can be overcome. If PayPal (the developer arm is now known as X Commerce) can provide API access to some of its services then why can’t other banks?

In Germany they have had APIs of a sort for quite some time in the form of the FinTS set of services. We were lucky enough to have several people from Germany in the group and they said that while FinTS was useful the way it had been implemented by the banks varied wildly between institutions. Open standards are desperately needed.

We were lucky enough to be joined by Simon Redfern from the Open Bank Project. An organisation looking to build a layer for the banks to plug into and then provide some standard data feeds in JSON with some RESTful APIs to hook into. Unsurprisingly they have not signed up any banks to take this on just yet but on paper this looks like just the kind of thing needed.

We discussed what the role of Swift was in all this. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is a global messaging network which deals with payment instructions. They would not really have access to the customer level data I am interested in but it would certainly be interesting to plug an API into this world.

Another angle was the Government. In the UK we have the MiData project kicking off at the moment. With the vision of handing customer data back to the customers. Some banks are signed up to this but as yet the detail around how data will be provided is not that well detailed and I think data extracts maybe preferred over API type access.

This is a really interesting topic that I think will be a major focus for the banking industry over the next 18-24 months.

Second session I attended was entitled ‘Does social media change everything or nothing in financial services’ I am not sure about the title of this thing (maybe replace social media with ‘ever evolving web’) but I like the sentiment.

I think the obvious thoughts are the likes of Google and Facebook will sweep aside the banking industry as we know it. I really don’t agree with that. Those companies have no interest in being banks. They might want some of that sweet, sweet financial data to better tune their marketing efforts but they don’t want the hassle of Basel 3 compliance etc.

That being said you cannot ignore the effect the web continues to have on society and banking is certainly not exempt from that. The two networks need to get closer and I believe the two can coexist. The banking one may look a bit long in the tooth comparatively but it is pretty good a transferring trillions of dollars per day without much issue (the small matter of global economics withstanding).

My third choice of the day was ‘Can you imagine a world with no POS terminals or plastic payment cards’. Like the previous session the big assumption is that mobile devices will change the way we pay to such an extent these mechanisms of trade will be consigned to the dustbin. Square might be the FS darling in the US at the moment but wide scale merchant usage at a corporate level will not be possible with such a system (the mag stripe alone makes it unusable outside the US). The discussion focussed around what the big players in this market actually do and why displacing them will be very hard.

The key element being the payment schemes and the functionality contained within them e.g. chargebacks, where customers of Visa could demand a refund from them if the goods the customer purchased from a third party were substandard. Are the new players going to be able to build these huge complex processes? The feeling from some part of the group was that this was maybe a bridge too far. This means the big players will probably stay as the big players…also Visa have a pretty big stake in Square anyway.

A slightly bizarre end to the day in the form of something that I had found difficult in the last session i.e. imagining a future without something so fundamental to pretty much everything we do today ‘What would be the plot of a movie about the future of the financial system?’.

Now obviously the premise was quickly established that the financial system as we knew it had completely failed (crippling virus or AI reached such a level of sentience that the HFT algorithms ran riot and heavily funded biotech which lead to the creation of an army of financially trading cyborgs that also had a physical presence so they could take over the world or a more plausible continuation of the real world events going on now). Either way the way things work today cease to be. Trying to think through what would happen if you no longer had any access to money. No way to buy. No reason to work. Hording would begin. Looting would break out. Society would surely break down. This would be a pretty depressing dystopian future so we had to try and inject some happy/hippy transitions.

Obviously barter systems would flourish (They have seen a resurgence in Greece recently) and the world would find new means of trade and currency and the things would be right again (as the rebel survivors successfully defeat the evil cyborgs) and no one would ever be short sighted or greedy again. There was a slight twist in the end in the form of a very clichéd cut to an underground bunker with a lone evil banking cyborg that had escaped the cull. Can’t see it getting made any time soon with a plot like that, I also suspect securing funding would be very difficult.

I personally got more out of this year’s event over last years. Not sure if that was to do with the more relevant/interesting topics or just feeling more comfortable with the format/audience/my willingness to shoot my mouth off. There was still a lack of (UK) bankers at the event which was a bit of a shame…that being said who wants a load of bankers at an innovation event anyway?

Nice work once again by Mr Birch and his associated organisers. Finovate Europe which was held the day after has meant some of Europe’s smartest in the industry come together in London for a few days. Organising events at either side of it is a no brainer. Same again next year please maybe with a few more events added on to make a week of it.

February 14, 2012 4 Comments

I am a Government Digital Service fanboy

I am not really a political person. I care little for any of the political parties and their identikit leaders but that government thing is quite important intit?

This post is about the relatively newly formed Government Digital Service team. Set up following recommendations laid out in Martha Lane-Fox’s Digital by Default report. This excellent report proposes a wholesale change to the way Government does IT. Focusing primarily on the digital experience and how government services online operate it also calls for changes to the way IT services are provisioned with regards to large vendors. I am more interested in the customer facing elements but the back end stuff is certainly revolutionary for such a large and bureaucratic organisation. The report states the following about how Directgov needs to refocus (point 4 being the most exciting from my geeky point of view).

The Directgov organisation should reduce and realign its resources to focus on:

1. architecting and managing a more focused consumer proposition

2. providing easy-to-navigate information/guidance to citizens on obligations, entitlements and actions that require interaction with government

3. providing easy to use, effective services that help citizens transact with government online, to drive channel shift

4. creating & agreeing cross-government standards that support our proposed ‘retail to wholesale’ shift, including standards on APIs and use of open technologies to support channel shift, and the stimulation of an eco-system of 3rd party distributors of Directgov content, tools and apps.

I believe there are many parallels with what is being outlined in the report with lots of organisations, banks in particular, and the way they need to adapt to the way the web is evolving and its increasing importance on evy day life. For me the approach being taken with regards to agile development, APIs and service orientated architecure, open source, design at the core and just a general appreciation of doing the web right is what makes this vision so compelling. The fact this being tried inside the government is even more admirable.

Putting their money where their mouth is. Clever words in a PDF are all well and good but to execute that vision you need some talented and smart employees. GDS have certainly hired well. Mike Bracken as Executive Director, Tom Loosemore as Deputy Director and most recently Ben Terrett to head up design. These are just a handful of the great talent they are amassing but it shows they mean business and this is not some half baked statement of intent but a real desire to improve how government is interfaced with by the majority of people in the UK.

I first became aware of what GDS were trying to achieve in May last year with the launch of the Alpha Gov prototype. This was the starting point for the vision of a single domain for government. They were seeking feedback from the off and it was not just some meaningless one way taking data in. Feedback works both ways and the fact they are using Get Satisfaction to collect it is also impressive. You could see from that early prototype that this was not your normal Government IT project. As well as the technical and design proficiency on show for me other elements showed that this was being designed by humans not some committee. The page for reporting stranded whales shows that humour could creep in and I am glad to see it has stayed in the Beta.

One concept laid out in the original vision is that the site must be designed around customer needs. We see this statement doled out by many organisations but I don’t think many of them really understand it. I love this statement from Ben Terrett’s post about why he joined the team.

The design challenge here seems to be – don’t avoid the obvious. Government websites are needs driven and what people want to do is get in, get what they want and then get out. Quickly.

The UI that gets out of the way will always be the best UI. Now the Government are in a lucky position in that they have no competitors and they don’t have to sell anything so they don’t need to plaster banner adverts everywhere but then again if you are designing a service for your customers and you have to put banner ads in the flow/UI then you don’t really understand the marketing value of a truly beautiful and ‘get out of the way UI’. You can also see from the photo on the left that this team take design very seriously.

Yet another area for praise is the use of blogging by this team has been exemplary, it is a real lesson in how to use a corporate blog. Sharing real detail on the what, how and why to their goals. I am not sure if one of the employment criteria was the ability to write well but they don’t seem to struggle for bloggers. The blog has allowed the culture to really come across to interested observers. You can tell that the people believe in the vision and you can tell they are bloody smart. I am not naïve enough to believe it is all a bed of roses, 120 staff means there will be some problems as humans will always be humans, but the clarity of the vision and purpose should at least mean everyone is headed in the right direction.

For me the project should be part of a major technological/organisational case study (Gartner/Forrester should be all over his shit) looking at how IT can be done right in a large bureaucratic organisation not renowned for its IT successes. The starting vision was almost perfect. The way they built a team of real talent showed it was more than words on paper. Execution is always the benchmark and so far they are doing rather well.

The beta site of Gov.UK was launched on the evening of the 31^st of January (for loads of detail on this and how they got there read this). The compliments flew by in my Twitter stream as lots of people shared their praise with the team. It was clear they had built on the successes of alpha.gov I n almost every way. The levels of transparency shown already in the project on the blog were trumped by two things they did on launch day. One they released a list of tools and technologies used Not one of these technologies tied them to a vendor. The only person it seems that is getting paid is Amazon who are hosting the site. They way it has been built means that it is portable to any cloud provider. ~~The eventual aim is for it to reside on G-Cloud (the government cloud infrastructure that is being built as part of he wider project)~~. UPDATE: I got this bit wrong, G-Cloud is a framework for buying cloud services, read this http://gcloud.civilservice.gov.uk/. The second thing was the fact they released all the code for the site to the open source repository, GitHub. Meaning anyone can inspect the code, take a copy and fork it to use it for themselves or if you are feeling brave try and make it better. For a government department to do this takes a huge amount of faith and must fly in the face of so many risk and security policies it is untrue. I really can’t imagine a bank ever doing this (Although (Bank) Simple have released some components there).

This post so far has been universally positive, as it should be, but I realise tougher tasks are yet to come for the team. Making the leap from direct.gov.uk to gov.uk will be a complex and tricky one. The flexibility built into gov.uk means that they can iterate constantly so I am guessing there will be no big bang migration just a ‘Well we have moved it all across now let’s switch off the other site’. Which sounds simple…

Looking back over this post it is at best fawning at worst blind slavish fanboy raving so I must find at least one thing to criticise but I have struggled. Here goes…the one thing I don’t like is the strange silvery pick arrow/banner on the home page. I can see how it ‘subtly’ points me to the big red search box but I don’t like the look of it. That is the only thing I have found so far that I don’t like and I really don’t care much about it.

It will be interesting to see how this site progresses over the rest of 2012. How the technology behind scales and improves. How the move to their own cloud goes. I am also interested to see what other elements they will bring to the site. Personalisation being one, especially as the identity used for a government website would be a very interesting thing indeed (NSTIC anyone?).

Lastly I must say a huge congratulations to the team for what they have built and to Martha Lane Fox and her original co-conspirators for creating such a well thought out and worthy vision. The desire to hire the best and the fact that the vision laid out allowed them to do just that has proved very successful indeed. I certainly think all big organisations (banks especially) with responsibility for customer facing IT should take a long hard look at this project and think why can’t this be done here? They would do well to drag themselves into the 21^st century and try to emulate this model. The ones that do will be he ones that will begin to look like organisations fit for the 21^st century which is exactly what the Government Digital Service looks like.

February 5, 2012 4 Comments

The Design of Understanding

Let’s give this blogging thing another go after a couple of months post free. Last Friday I went to a place in London and listened to some clever people talk about some interesting things at an event called Design of Understanding. Here are some words that don’t do the event justice.

It was an eclectic mixture of speakers brought together by a seemingly nice chap called Max Gadney. He kicked off the day with some words of wisdom, the ones which caught my ear the most was ‘all forms of communication should impart understanding’ be the the way we perceive and use physical device or interpret a barely coherent post. This phrase seemed like a nice framing of the day. Here are some notes on my 3 favourite talks of the day.

Timo Arnall of Berg shared his love of film and how he believed it to be the most powerful means of communication. Berg are interested in how new technologies fit into the world. Film gives them the ability to show time, behaviours and to allow them to unpack (this may have been the most used word of the day) technologies. He showed a beautiful example made by Polaroid in 1972. An 11 minute film by Ray & Charles Eames that explained how the SX-70 folding SLR camera worked. No marketing guff of today but a clear and concise explanation of the science behind the device.

The myths that evolve around technology were another source of interest. RFID technology that is still perceived as a new technology even though there are around 4 billion RFID tags and chips in the world. This technology invokes irrational fears and leads to people creating things like copper wired jeans to block the devices being tracked. Is this in part due to the fact that so few people know how these things actually work? How they interact with the world around them? Berg produced a video visualising the fields around the device by using LEDs and sensors, mixed with long exposure photography. The resulting video is a thing of beauty.

The use of film in this was by Berg has lead them to create something they are calling new grammar. The video almost becomes the product of their design work. The power of this communication form has been proved many times by Berg. Matt Jones wrote a fascinating piece about new grammar and its origins.

Timo ended with the Heathquote. Wise words from Chris Heathcote of Dentsu.

“the world is going to get strange and magical, and people will be confused and fearful. Designers will have to do what they do best, helping people navigate these environments”

RFID (and its bigger brother NFC) will become increasingly used to the point of ubiquity over the next 5-10 years. How these technologies are designed to work in the world will be key. I think Berg will certainly help figure that out.

It was a bloody good start to the day.

Just before lunch it was the turn of James Bridle. Not really sure how to explain who James is or what he does. In Max Gadney’s speaker notes he said this about James, which I think sums hims up very well.

“I am always impressed at how his interest in something means he needs to make it, not just to create an objet d’art but more that in order to investigate and understand he makes the thing”

I agree. He is also whip crack smart and a very funny fella.

One of the similarities between James and Timo’s talk was time. James is interested in the effect time has on things in this digital age. He created a series of books that documented the Iraq War based on every edit to the Wikipedia page about that event. A historiography of argument about a series of facts. James jokingly said that because of his background in publishing he always made books. He has also created a book based on his whereabouts over a whole year based on the tracking data from his iPhone, entitled Where the fuck was I. He has also published 50 versions of the Charles Dickens novel, Hard Times, with each version being slightly different. One edition is translated into Russian and back again into English.

Another element of time mentioned was the penchant for taking photos today with smart phone cameras and applying retro effects. As we strive to get our photos looking like the Polaroids of the 70s what does this do to the perception of time. If we see a street scene with a sepia tint we would assume it was from a bygone age. But what does the future look like? What are the digital effects or the contents of the photo to make it look more futuristic. This lead into one of James’ key themes of interest/research which he has called the New Aesthetic.

“For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products.”

You can see this collection at the new aesthetic Tumblr. He said he was now receiving links from people asking ‘Is this the New Aesthetic?’ I can confess I am guilty of this.

I highly recommend you watch this talk by James from last year as he explains the topic in a far more eloquent way than I ever could. You should also check out his portfolio and some of the other things he has made such as Rorschmap (a kaleidoscope view of the world from above), A ship adrift (a bot set adrift based on weather conditions…currentlky somewhere over eastern Europe) and the recently launched Bus Tops, which he called ‘the worlds largest animated GIF sharing infrastructure’ i.e. connected screens on the top of bus shelters to display art. Lunch.

Last talk of the day came from Dan Hill. Dan is a Strategic Design Lead at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. They look into many things but mainly how design can be used to enable change at a city wide level ‘A single building cannot change a city’.

He spoke of the need to change the dark matter that binds the huge organisations/organisms that are cities. The dark matter being the name Dan gave to the rules and regulations that the city must abide buy even though some of these rules are seemingly unwritten. Sitra looking into new building materials. They wanted to used compressed laminate beams for building structures as they are more environmentally sound than concrete but they are classed as wood, even though they do not burn. The regulations from the 1900s do not allow this. We see so many problems of the 21st century trying to be fixed by 18th century organisations and the rules they created. I can see no parallels with banking here what so ever.

Another example given was around food trucks in Helsinki. They have 10 food trucks for the whole of Helsinki. They all sell the same thing…which did not look pleasant. All restaurants close at 10pm. Drunk revellers seek food much later. They have no choice. The licenses required to open a food truck become available every 10 years. The dark matter of the city prevented innovation around the very important subject of food…or did it? Illegal food sales have began to spring up in parks. People sell food from their windows getting round the restrictions. One brave soul decided to build a crepe truck, Caminoette, and defy the rules. The city regulators were not happy but an 11,000 fan Facebook page and subsequent campaign lead the city, in election year, to reconsider its strict stance. What Sitra are interested in is how more flexibility can be added to the rules to allow for more spikes of innovation. Unpacking the dark matter to make it matter.

These three speakers were the primary reason I wanted to attend this conference. They did not disappoint. I would love to set them loose in a certain industry beginning with B. To see what Timo’s films would unpack, what James would make of the data and what Dan thought about the whole bloody thing. Wonder if I can make that happen? Why on earth would they want to?

There were more speakers and they were all good. Gill Ereaut spoke about the language of corporations and how the way people talk, or name departments lets the culture seep out. Luis Rey talked about the importance of illustration mixed with research, a desire to challenge and a sense of drama to alter the way historians thought about dinosaurs. Tom Armitage spoke of rules and mechanics in games and how the fun of play and ultimately understanding comes from the friction between those collections of rules and mechanics. ‘What toy do you give a 9 year old to show them what the future looks like? Video Games’

A fine first conference of 2012 for me. Thanks to the organisers and the speakers for a brain filling day. I will be the first to admit though that I am not smart enough to have understood all of it. Only so much design you can do.

February 1, 2012 1 Comment

Please can someone improve Twitter lists

I have recently been creating a number of Twitter lists. These list are being created from spreadsheets of names that I then search Twitter and Google to see if they have a Twitter account. I then store the URL to the account in a spreadsheet against the name. I then create some lists in the spreadsheet. I then cut and paste the URL back into the browser and add the person to a list or lists. I usually hit the hourly API limit after about 70 entries.

This manual process is a fucking ballache.

Why is there no way to batch create Twitter lists from a list of Twitter usernames or URLs? What I want to do is to copy and paste a list of usernames or account URLs into a field, give the list a name and a description and then click a button to create the list. Also why is there no way to search for people based on their email address? I can get round this by adding email addresses to an email account and then using the find my friends option but this is extra manual work and I am lazy. These people may also not be my friends so it feels like a lie.

There are many other things I would like to fix with Twitter lists e.g. Why can’t I copy and paste between users? Merge lists? why can’t I manage them on the Twitter for iPad app? The bulk creation of them is most pressing. Anyone with some coding skills fancy knocking up an app to fix this? It might be a good project for me to try and learn some coding skills but as previously mentioned I am lazy and I am also an awful programmer. Better yet Twitter people fix your functionality. I am willing to pay for this feature (Why are there no ProAm features?). Plea over.

November 28, 2011 Add Comment

Death Star desires and regrets at Playful 2011

Friday the 28th of October was a day I had been looking forward to for a while. It was Playful 2011. It came after a week in which I had to give two big presentations that had been playing on my mind for quite some time so for me it was nice and relaxing to sit back and watch others present on a range of fascinating topics.

The day was kicked off by Toby Barnes of Mudlark. Last year he bemoaned the proliferation of gamification, summed up with a line that has stuck with me ‘no one wants a playful bank’. This year he bemoaned the fact that the future he had been promised as a child had not been delivered. No more space shuttles, no Death Stars, no futuristic concrete shopping centres. Nothing that makes a dent in the world. He always bemoaning. He is right though. This set the tone for the majority of the day. A future lost. A mundane future. We need to dream big again.

Al Robertson was the first non-Toby speaker of the day and he told how most Sci-Fi turned out to be wrong. The Mekon did not arrive in the mid 90s and Lycra suits will never be in fashion. Because of this some people found it too risky to become involved deeply in a form of fiction that is too far from reality and that in all likelihood will never be true.

Cities were mentioned several times throughout the day. Matt Sheret of Last.FM talked about the made up city of Altdorf from Warhammer, the voice given to city objects and infrastructure like Tower Bridge in London and how new stories were being weaved about future towns via metadata using the Derby 2061 project as an example. Are these fictional constructs to be used for good or evil? Is making buildings talk creepy? Will Derby really have a future? And was the game Warhammer just an excuse for Matt’s friend to try and kill him. Either way we need to pick a side.

Another worry from the day was the automation of things and how we interact with them. Louise Downe was worried about toilets. Automatic air fresheners and self flushing toilets. How do you flush the toilet twice? Stand up and sit down again? The issue is about trust and intimacy with these machines. Until they think like we do or we can truly put ourselves in their shoes to understand how they work then that intimacy will never occur.

Louise used a couple of great examples to show how people lack intimacy with the systems around them. How people keep all their receipts as they think credit card companies systems always try to steal from you. How the stories around how ID theft occur get more and more vivid the greater the lack of understanding people have.

The funniest talk of the day came from Brendan Dawes. A man raised in a shit north western seaside town (not Blackpool). A town where the future arrived in the form of arcade machines. Machines With perplexing interfaces like the button laden Defender machines. Darkened rooms full of these machines and the noises and atmosphere that went with them. There were no fruit machines there though as they were for scallys, he told us.

These interfaces shaped Brendan’s outlook and he told of a Microsoft Surface project using knobs that interacted with the device when placed on the screen. The client for the project wanted to add instructions as they thought it was too complex ‘I will resign if we have to put instructions on this’ he told the client ‘I wouldn’t as I need to pay the mortgage’ he confided.

Brendan likes to make things. He told us everyone needs a shed but that for him his shed was a mental construct or as his wife called it, the back room. Brendan did not feel the future had let him down he thought right now we are living in a very exciting period. A time when he can have a 3D printer in his back room and he can print egg cups to replace his broken ceramic ones.

After lunch it was time for The Kaiser, Marcus John Henry Brown. Lovingly introduced by Toby as a scummer (he comes from Southampton the sworn enemy of Toby’s home town of Portsmouth) Marcus set about saying the future we dreamt of is clouding our vision. We are seemingly bound by the Sci-Fi cannon and the ideas they presented in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Marcus called this the middle aged future. Middle aged men obsessed with what they had seen as children. We need to think further out. Marcus urged us to think like really young children. Give a box to a four year old he will go to the moon. Give it to an 8 year old and they will put books in it.

As a writer Marcus has tried to construct some futures 120 years away to try and escape the cannon. The Billion Dollar Dream, a world with no oil, no travel, no plastics etc. A dream within a dream, layered futures and Murder they wrote the future we wanted actually happened then what. Try to Think like a child in these scenarios and it is very very difficult because of our constricted view of the world and the baggage of the world we imagined.

The most explosive and fear inducing talk of the day came from Matt Ward who talked about fake bombs. He had worked on a project called Green = Boom the aims of which were around ‘exploring the notion of ‘recreational bombs’, as a reaction against the over sanitisation of everyday life’ or to put it another way to see what we could create to put people in very tense situations.

The group he worked with made ever more complex fake bombs with balloons simulating the explosive effect. Balloons/Bombs were stuffed up jumpers and placed on heads to add an element of real fear to the diffusion of the fake bomb. The sense of cutting that red or green wire became much more visceral and just like the movies. They found that getting people to suspend their disbelief was easier than they had imagined and real fear was felt in varying degrees by all participants. The people involved in testing the devices were also willing them to go further to heighten the tension e.g. Show a video of some children held hostage, further adding to the research that not only were people willing o suspend belief they were also more than willing to become sick terrorists. It made me think how you would apply these tensions and mechanisms into real life to stop you doing something stupid.

Could you build some sort of fake bomb type device that made you think twice before putting your logon details into a strange site or how about adding some bomb defusing tension to a payment transaction to stop you making a terribly expensive error e.g. buying an expensive item of clothing that you would wear only once.

As the day drew to a close there were two talks that, due to tiredness, I did not have the mental capacity to really appreciate fully. They were both excellent.

The kinkiest talk of the day came from Georgina Voss who talked about the risks, ethics and consent in play using examples from the world of BDSM. For those unaware the acronym BDSM is derived from Bondage, Domination, Submission and Masochism and various mixtures thereof. More commonly aggregated by the unknowing as S&M. Gemma talked about the importance of consent in play and how the rules around acceptance of play are important.

One term in my the talk stood out and in my notes I had written the word with a star next to it. The term was RACK and here is the description from Gemma’s presentations notes.

‘rack’ – risk aware consensual kink. This refuses any unrealistic commitment to safety over risk taking. Instead it includes an adult awareness of potential risk, accompanied by harm reduction strategies, where risk is defined as the potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur.

This adult attitude to riskier forms of play could relate to many things. Naturally I thought about the financial world and the more complex trading and investment environments.I am sure there are lots of obvious jokes around linking BDSM to investment bankers but like Torture Garden it is probably best that I don’t go there. Great talk and I highly recommend you download the slides and notes.

Second brain tester towards the end of the day came from the BBC’s Paul Rissen. Paul wants to make the web more playful o to be more accurate the web of data more playful. Paul explained about the ever growing ecosystem of linked data and that while this is a very important thing it is a bit dull. He laid out a triangle structure of the data world, the physical world and the fiction world. The interactions between these elements offering differing views of the world with some of the interactions being more under utilised than others. I can’t really do justice to this talk without listing all the examples given. Better to just go and read Paul’s detailed notes on the talk. This is the talk I will most likely be coming back to over the next few months.

The day ended with a ramshackle, pitch laden car crash of a presentation from UsTwo. It was hilarious. They told how they had spent a lot of their investors money on lots of games that had sold minuscule amounts. They were all in on one last project. 4,500 hours spent already. 100s of thousands spent. Pressure. They showed designs and concepts from the game. Showed a music video of the theme tune that was recorded by Gruff Rhys from the Super Furry Animals and told how they had added achievements at the last minute as everyone loves badges.

The game is Whale Trail and over its first weekend on sale it sold 38,000 copies. It had been made Apples game of the week globally the day before the talk. They were suffering from major hangovers. The game is great. Buy it.

And that was it for another year. A really great selection of talks. Some mind noodling ideas that are still fizzing round my brain. Some of my less enlightened colleagues fail to see the correlation between Playful and banking and questioned why I attended the conference. I could wheel out stories about the adjacent possible as explained beautifully by Steven B. Johnson or regurgitate quotes from Steve Jobs about the need for a breadth of experiences but I will just say that listening to a lot of smart people’s ideas, experiences, hopes and dreams is good for the soul and the brain. Excellent work by Greg and Toby to organise such a great event. Roll on Playful 2012.

PS Toby won’t ever have a Death Star. Hopefully his children just might.

November 7, 2011 Add Comment

Crowdsourced Job Title

I am about to run out of business cards at work. I fancy a change of job title on the next batch.

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I need some help coming up with a new job title. I got promoted 18 mths ago but never changed it. I have decided to crowdsource a new one.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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Current job title = Innovation Technician. What should my new one be? *Stands back and awaits abuse/comedy/serious suggestions*

aden_76
October 25, 2011

And boy did they come flooding in…

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@aden_76 Lord

em_cooper
October 25, 2011

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@em_cooper Lord Aden of Innovation?

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Lord Aden of Banking Innovation and Stuff

em_cooper
October 25, 2011

Has a certain ring to it.

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@aden_76 King.

Whatleydude
October 25, 2011

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@Whatleydude Splendidly regal but does it really give enough detail about what I do?

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 You rule.

Whatleydude
October 25, 2011

Thank you James.

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@aden_76 I nearly got away with putting “Director of WOW” at Telstra 12 years ago when we were doing an “e-business” pilot with bus cards

AndrewGrill
October 25, 2011

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@AndrewGrill I tried for Head of Awesome on some business cards a while back just to see if our secretary was checking. She was.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 “Master Keith”

MarcusJHBrown
October 25, 2011

I am not smart enough or cool enough to know what this means but it made me snort like a pig.

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@aden_76 Moob Technician

haddington
October 25, 2011

Some people can be so cruel. Chubby rosy cheeked people especially.

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@haddington Good one Rosy Cheek Administrator

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 leave it blank with a insert what you think I am option. So its Aden D: Job (pls fill in) ___________

SA5G
October 25, 2011

The marketer thinking outside the box.

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@aden_76 Widget Afficionado

IanBurgePR
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 got to include ‘evangelist’ somewhere

danmux
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 though having ‘innovation’ in your title implies everyone else isn’t responsible for innovation, so you’re probably fucked. 😀

danmux
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Innovation Champion? Or why not invent a new one – Innovationalist! (i like that one)

Karen_Lewis
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Jedi Ninja Innovation Evangelistia for Disruptive Currency Environments, SVP (CAPS not optional)

LizLum
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 I forgot include: ‘Member of the Executive Board for Gamafication Gurus’

LizLum
October 25, 2011

6 point font required to get all that on one card

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@aden_76 stick with Innovation Technician – there’s something delightfully je ne sais quoi about it 🙂

jangles
October 25, 2011

He has a point.

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@aden_76 High Evangelist – Digital, Innovation Conversionalist, Digital Guru, Innovation badgerer

superjeans
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Mega something.

rossbreadmore
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 SMEB

benterrett
October 25, 2011

Possibly the most offensive suggestion of the day. Again made me laugh a lot.

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@aden_76 *REDACTED* / *CLASSIFIED*

JonRowe
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Innovation Pornstar; Near Field Marshal; Cloud Cuckoo.

socialtechno
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 Surely it’s ‘Defender of the Universe’? I can think of no other title suitable for your good self.

purplesime
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 I always was a big fan of ‘Director of Facsimile Transmission’

quintinsykes
October 25, 2011

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“@imperica: Some advice here, perhaps? http://goo.gl/nFGmz Best job title – FMCG business “Global Head of Hair”” amazing.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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@aden_76 How about just ‘Aden’? You’re really good at being Aden, and can claim you’re fulfilling your objectives every year…

johnjsills
October 25, 2011

I like the practical nature of this suggestion. Maybe Chief Aden. VP of Aden.

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Sensible but boring suggestions = Innovation Analyst or Architect.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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The wankiest one I have come up with so far is Digital Futurist…or maybe should go with Post-Digital Futurist for full on comedy.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

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‘if you call yourself digital futurist im cancelling your table at the christmas do’ Harsh words from @Paul_Woodhouse1

aden_76
October 25, 2011

My team mates were not as supportive as I would have liked

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People on the Internet are funny.

aden_76
October 25, 2011

And that was the end of that little experiment. Some fantastically amusing suggestions. I am no closer to deciding on a new job title or whether to just keep my current meaningless one. Either way it was a very amusing hour or so. Thank you one and all.

Just had two more that had to be added….

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@aden_76 Daydream Maestro has a good ring to it.