Category: Ramblings

I want to write more in 2015. I would also like to try a bit of that working out loud type stuff.  Inspired by the brilliant Alex Deschamps-Sonsino I have copied her end of year review questions (Which I believe were created by Molly Steenson) and written some answers.

1. What did you do in 2014 that you’d never done before?

Travel to Hong Kong. Travelled business class. Drank beer at a bar in a plane. I did some ‘teaching’ at work. Left a suitcase on the tube like a knob head.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Not really and yes. Better to have tried and failed than not tried at all or something grandiose sounding that absolves my laziness/weakness at habit forming/breaking

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No.

5. What countries did you visit?

Hong Kong, India, Dubai (airport), France, Wales.

6. What would you like to have in 2015 that you lacked in 2014?

A greater sense of focus, purpose and a promotion.

7. What date from 2014 will remain etched upon your memory?

December 12th

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

The teaching thing. I had to produce and deliver materials to teach very technically gifted employees about innovation and creativity. Properly dauntingly talented people PhD’s, scientists from CERN etc. and me with an HND in Business Information Technology from Sheffield Hallam. It went well though, the feedback was great and I got to visit Hong Kong, India and London to deliver my reckons.

I must also mention the War Cards. An idea of mine from last year that came to fruition thanks to the brilliant work of one of my colleagues. It gave me A real sense of pride.

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War Cards exhibit in the foyer of HSBC HQ #2

A post shared by Aden Davies (@aden_76) on Nov 13, 2014 at 9:54am PST

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not making enough of the teaching opportunity (and others) that it would have been recognised as more of an achievement by others.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

After a painful 2013 thankfully not.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Can’t remember anything of note I bought for myself. Best purchase for others was a £7 LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary book for my four year old son. He loves it.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Malala Yousafzai. The Daily Show interview.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Some people that shall remain nameless.

The UKIP and all their supporters.

Ched Evans’ PR advisors (as well as Ched himself).

Idiotic American gun owners.

Power crazed men in Russia/Ukraine, Middle East, Africa etc.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Mortgage payments.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Not enough. I did enjoy travelling a lot. I also really enjoyed my sons getting into LEGO and Star Wars. Having our first child free weekend at home in over four years another highlight.

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That's me

A post shared by Aden Davies (@aden_76) on Jul 6, 2014 at 12:01am PDT

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2014?

Todd Terje – Strandbar.

East India Youth – Hinterland.

One of the few gigs I went was to see Slow Club at The Leadmill as part of The Tramlines festival. They basically played there new album  which I had heard nothing of but thought it was brilliant on the night. Repeat listenings have proved I was right.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

Wiser from my mistakes and determined to get better.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing. It is like I have shut off part of my brain, and there is not much to shut off. A thing I must revive in 2015 starting with this.

Working on what others deemed the right things.

Saw more live music and comedians.

Playing with my children.

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Splashtime

A post shared by Aden Davies (@aden_76) on Jan 3, 2015 at 10:37am PST

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Eating, sitting and misplacing loyalty.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

For the first time it was spent at home and it was lovely.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?

The lady of my life or Mercury Taxis or China House takeaway.

22. Did you fall in love in 2014?

Only more deeply (brownie point answer in case a certain someone is reading)

23. What was your favourite TV programme?

Sons of Anarchy finished strongly i.e. as ludicrously as the previous six seasons. It is basically a show about leadership and terrible decisions.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Hate is too strong a word but there are a few that my opinion of has decreased significantly this year.

25. There does not seem to be a 25th question in Alex’s version. Maybe I should make one up? What was your favourite photo that you took?

This one of my two boys at Burbage on top of a rock

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Brothers at Burbage

A post shared by Aden Davies (@aden_76) on Jul 20, 2014 at 11:13am PDT

26. What was the best book(s) you read?

The Circle & Ready Player One. Both a bit silly but fun.

Best business book by a mile was Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull about how Pixar became Pixar.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The previously mentioned East India Youth and Todd Terje. Also GoGo penguin.

28. What did you want and get?

I really can’t think of anything. I need to start being more selfish and wanting some stuff. Set more goals and shit. Although I did want some help this year and there were some really helpful people who gave me some. Those guys were brilliant.

29. What did you want and not get?

My children to sleep more.

30. What were your favourite films of this year?

Snowpiercer, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Edge of Tomorrow…

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I am 38 and I had to ask my significant other to remind me what I had done and she could not remember either. Clearly it was not that memorable/my memory is fading in ‘old age’. Must have a better 39th birthday celebration.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Did I mention a promotion? Or being able to get my children to sleep? or eat?  Or do anything I ask them?

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2014?

What ever was in my wardrobe and fitted. Probably a checked shirt and jeans.

34. What kept you sane?

My beautiful and patient significant other.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

No one springs to mind. I quite like comedienne Sara Pascoe, mainly because she is very funny and strikes me as being particularly
intelligent, which is clearly hot.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

My continued despair at my own disinterest in UK politics. What a bunch of pricks we have as political party leaders. My local MP is Nick Clegg. I have nothing to vote for.

37. Who did you miss?

No one springs to mind.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Same answer as the last question. Both answers are a real shame.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2014.

Misplaced loyalty makes you feel like a dog.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

‘Bass, how low can you go?’

That was really difficult but I found it useful. I did not have a great 2014.  I wonder how next years answers will differ knowing I will be asking myself the same questions again? Will I take more notes because I can’t remember enough? Will I try and do more exciting things?

Let’s see if I can kick start a more frequent writing habit. New Year’s resolution number one.

In the same way that Salesforce commoditised CRM I often wonder what if they did the same to core banking. If they built a set of banking services that ran on the exact same platform as their CRM solution and could use the ecosystem that has built up around it. What would a bank pretty much entirely powered by and run on the Salesforce platform look like?

In June last year Salesforce and Oracle announced a strategic partnership which caught my eye. It was a mixture of we will use your stuff and you can use ours. Oracle do have a core banking solution and I wondered how tightly that could be integrated into Salesforce. Alternatively what if Salesforce built one from the ground up?

Salesforce already have payroll, payments and accounting capabilities. They already integrate into financial services and systems in a number of areas but could they go further? They would of course need banking and money transmission licenses for the markets they wanted to operate in. We would also need to see moves by the regulator to approve Salesforce infrastructure. In the Netherlands last year we saw Amazon Web Services gain approval for usage in financial services so no reason why Salesforce could not have approved bank grade data centres and services.

The term bank in a box get bandied about in all kinds of places (well the dull ones I oft inhabit) Salesforce could be the first company to really achieve that and all in the cloud. Not bank in a box, which harks back to the days of software installs but bank in the cloud, which looks to the misty ill-defined future.

I am sure Mr Benioff is all over this, if not my consultancy and reckon services are available for a very competitve license fee.

UPDATE 17/03/2015. Looks like they are making a few moves in this direction. Invested in nCino a newish bank software platform built on you know what.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/03/17/salesforce-bets-on-banking-software/

http://www.ncino.com/

Following on from a spectacularly successful PR campaign the social network Ello was the hot new startup bouncing round the echo chamber. The thing that made them different was that they would not do any of that naughty data sales and manipulation stuff that sites like Facebook do. All very laudable but how would they make money? And more importantly why would the masses leave the social networks that do the rest of the stuff (bar privacy it seems) better than Ello do today?

I am a fan of any attempts by a business to be upfront with how it intends to make money. We have been here before with the likes of Diaspora and App.net and others and they all have ultimately failed to become anything like a mainstream success. Not a major issue of course but if these privacy aims are to be copied by the larger networks there needs to be financial success as well I suspect.

These sites need to solve a problem that has not already been solved or provide functionality far above that what is already available today along with privacy levels we all deserve. Easy.

But.

What if we saw a different kind of transparency? We want to make money and this is how we are going to do it and anything we choose to do we will run by you before doing it. Yes we will sell your data, in this way and to these people and we will also make it available to you in the same form, We will invite the marketers to descend etc. Can transparency and more seemingly realistic business models be harmonious or would people hate all the evil marketing focused money making stuff that people would never agree to any of the changes? Smart value exchange for the business models used, micro stock holding based on value to the network etc. etc.

Also what about more radical modes of transparency. I am a big fan of the way Buffer App is open with everything from their burn rate to their salaries. What does a fully transparent social network/web company look like?

In the banking world we have seen a few transparent business models. Barclaycard Ring, a community based credit card with very transparent trading practices (such a shame that it is only live in the US at the moment. Triodos bank is very open and honest about it’s lending practices. In the past Caixa Bank in Spain famously told customers how much profit they made from them and allowed them to invest a portion of that in local charities and social enterprises.

There clearly needs to be a strong mixture of ethics and design to succeed. I don’t think it can be just enough to say we won’t do anything bad with your data or money these companies must obviously also be better in other ways than the companies they wish to disrupt or differentiate themselves from. I wish Ello luck but I think we all know how this story ends. I hope that people keep trying to be as transparent as possible in business, especially banking, but I also hope they can make better services and products that match their ethical aims.

*I was beaten to the punch with this title by the fantastic author Warren Ellis. I stuck with it because it fitted well with my reckons. Here is his article which is clearly much better written as he is an author etc. 

The very smart Greg Povey tweeted a random little thought / call to action today ‘Make a mixtape from when you were seventeen’. Ok, I will.

Make a mixtape from when you were seventeen.

— Gregory Povey (@topfife) July 24, 2014

Greg also wrote a few words about it including this

Seventeen is a tricksy time of life to pinpoint: an age of leaving immaturity, delusions of adulthood, tastes developing but still relatively primitive. Mismemory will con you into thinking your seventeen year old self had the tastes of your fourteen or twenty year olds.

March 31st 1993 was when I  turned 17. I was coming to the end of my GCSE resit year at Tapton School in Sheffield following a bit of a screw up due to a serious lack of revision the previous year.  A tricksy time of life indeed.

I was mainly into drum and bass/trance and hip hop. There are a few stand out DnB tracks from that time but mainly it was about the DJ and the mix and the MC. When looking back it turned out that 1993 was a massive year for hip hop and there are singles and albums I still listen too today from this period. By the end of my 17th year my interest in hip hop was on the wane. Excesses had crept into the albums and videos, it as all 2Pac, Biggie and Puffy and I hated all three of them. Legal drinking age beckoned as did trance and drunm and bass nights at the Palais.

By March 1994  hip hop had been largely left behind but for the majority of my 17th year it was pretty much all I listened too.  Here is my age 17 mixtape. Eleven hop hop classics and One final track that mapped out my music taste for the next few years until things got a lot more guitar based.

Sharna Jackson the compere for Playful 2013 called it ‘An amuse bouche of ludic geniosity’. I am not entirely sure what that means but I think it summed up the day perfectly. The sub heading for the conference was ‘playing with form’ and it focused on making and the materials used (A familiar pattern to my conference attendance lately). Here is my attempt to summarise my favourite talks of the day. I will probably not do them justice.

Duncan Fitzsimmons – Vitamin Design

Duncan is a designer at a firm made up of a random mix of people, electrical engineers alongside more traditional designers etc. an intriguing mix that informs and shapes their work. He spoke of using bananas to get elderly people to design their ideal mobile phone. The ‘silver phones’ as they are called today are usually Fisher price looking things with massive buttons and limited functions (he showed some that did not even have enough numbers to dial a new number, just store numbers. They took a different approach due to the fact they could see that elderly people were getting the exact same smartphones we all are. The problem is that no one reads the manual as it is more often than not, useless. They built the ideal manual, a book that the phone and its parts e.g. the SIM card, sat in the middle of. Each page revealed the next step in setting up the device, it then had pointers to the areas on the screen and instructions to follow. Building the device into a book meant it formed a much tighter bond with the device and increased the knowledge of the user to a different level. Watch the video.

The second project he showed was sensor design for snowboarders, he showed how they prototyped things in their labs, trying out the most Heath Robinson of contraptions and refining as they went until they actually tested them out at the snow centre in Leicester. The closer the sensors got to the real world and snow the more challenges presented themselves, they managed to make a kind of speedometer that tracked actual movement over snow, when they tested it on snow it worked perfectly up to about 4mph. Duncan then showed a video of it in real use. Watch it. Imagine what it would be like to hook it up to FX traders (while they trade FX rather than hurtle down a mountain)

Thirdly he showed how they designed a foldable wheel, a problem that has been tackled many times before but never truly cracked. They had been challenged with making a folding wheel to form part of a folding wheelchair to make travel easier. Again it was fascinating to see the prototypes and their progression from almost string and lollipop sticks through to printed metal forms and different types of solid tyre and innertube. The end result was amazing, award winning and in production now.

Anne Hollowday – The Makers of things

The talk I was most looking forward to was this one. Anne made a series of films about the makers of things which were released earlier this year. She interviewed a series of gentlemen who were part of the SMEE. They are dyed in the wool makers, electrical engineers, woodworkers, tinkerers and hobbyists with garages and workshops that had grown over a life time of making. One of the makers filmed, George, said he had been ‘making sawdust since he was 11’. I urge you to go and watch all the films, they are only 5-6 minutes long, there are 5 of them and they are beautiful.

The quote that came out from those films and a similar thing was mentioned in other talks, was a quote from one of the makers featured, Mike Crisp and he said ‘Make what it is you want build and learn as you go’. There is a wonderful moment in the woodworker film where he talks about the grain of wood ‘Each bit of wood has its own destiny, which you don’t really know until you start digging into it and find out what’s inside there’

One of the downsides with playful is that they don’t film the talks (a purposeful decision to do with your own memory of things) but I really wish they did as I would have liked to watch this one again.

The films also made me think of James Bridle’s working shop where he tried to frame coding in a similar way (probably becasue the film is also by Anne). These digital things that we make might not have the same feel or the same detritus as wood or metal that shows work is being done here but they are one in the same.

John Wilshire – Putting things in things

John did a great talk that was about boxes both the physical and the metaphorical that was smart, witty, Scottish and featured molten brass being poured dangerously into a tin mould. Thankfully John himself has written his talk up over here. Go and read that.

Ben Reade – Nordic Food Lab

Ben strode onto the stage and he was a massive and blonde haired Nordic sterotype. Turns out he is Scottish but he has a weird scandianglo brogue that was as bemusing and mind bending as his brilliant talk. The Nordic Food Lab is a place where people experiment with food. Part funded by the famous Noma restaurant in Denmark it is a place where, in Ben’s words, people were free to experiment without judgement. I love that description. His first job upon joining the lab was to trap the smells created during the making of chicken stock. His experiments lead him to build a still, as in the type used to create alcohol, turns out this is illegal in Denmark unless you have a license but as he was distilling chicken and not alcohol he got round the rules.

In Denmark they have more than one word for play. They have the word ‘Spille’ which means play within the rules and they have the word ‘Lege’ which means to play with no rules. Ben’s work was certainly more about the latter.

His other experiments were even more bizarre. The food lab has a Nobel Rotting Room. This is a place where they play with fermentation, and mould growth and other forms of naturally occurring things in the hunt for new flavours and textures and experiences.

Ben spoke of his research into mummification ‘We could not easily get access to Egyptians but we did have some dear’. Using specific kinds of bacteria that make fruit break down in certain ways that would allow them to be coated in wax and preserved and infused with flavour as part of the process. They ended up making a kind of faux olive that was actually unripened plums that were waxed. From one of their experiments they discovered a form of wild spinach that when left to ferment with an odd mixture of other things tasted exactly like fine fois gras.

‘Zero method and all the madness’ was a memorable line Ben used to try and explain a whole host of failed techniques they had tried but that did not stop them trying over and over again with new combinations.

I will leave the last word to well known food critic/explorer, Anthony Bourdain, on a visit to the food lab and his encounters in the Nobel Rotting Room

‘You guys have got some seriously f***** up s*** down there’

Stef Posavec – Dancing at Facebook

Of all the people I have seen speak at conferences Stef might be the person I have seen the most and she is always brilliant. This time her talk was primarily about her recent stint at Facebook working at their analog research lab.

‘I had a guy who could basically get me any Facebook data I wanted’ was the position Stef found herself in and while I can imagine having something that vast must have been tempting to go big Stef did the opposite and went small. Stef mapped the Facebook campus bars…on a bar chart of course, looked at smaller and more personal interactions and visualised those using dance notation.

Stef had some smart rules for data visualisation

1. Represent data truthfully;

2. Always try to show subtle insight;

3. Provide an explanation;

4. Use meaningful data;

5. Context

Stef is one of those people that I would love to be able to say ‘If you had access to any banking data what would you choose and what would you make?’ one day perhaps.

Rev Dan Catt – The perfect game of snakes and ladders

Dan Catt is someone’s whose work and writing I have admired for some time. He is an ex-employee of Flickr and the Guardian and is now freelance building lots of wonderful things for money or fun or both.

For his talk he wanted to tell us about the best snakes and ladders board. This is it below.

What is so good about it is that this board allows him to play with his children and the game last round about 10 minutes each time, the perfect amount of time to have a fun time and keep your children’s attention span. The board was not created by hand in any traditional manner but by code and algorithms and cloud computing.

The inspiration for this came from the now defunct Kindle DX, The large screen kindle Amazon released for a short period in the US. Dan inspired by friends wondered if you could use it to create infinite game board. Taking traditional games and generating an infinite amount of new layouts but within controlled boundaries. For example for Snakes and Ladders he had to code rules that said do not place two snakes too closely together or to make sure the angle of the ladders was not too horizontal, code that returned both aesthetically pleasing and nice to game boards.

Dan ran nine free instances on Amazon Web Services to generate the boards and then one further machine to grade the boards. He had created over a billion boards so far. All this computing power for free (he keeps under the daily limits) means he can run these things continuously (I think he said he wanted to run it for five years to create perfection). A brilliant mind.

Another great day at Conway Hall.