Category: Ramblings

Friday Reading #21

I assume many people who work for massive corporations have dreamed of working somewhere smaller in the hope that they can see the impact of their work and not feel like a useless tiny cog in a gigantic mega machine. Not me of course, I would not want to work in some cool purpose driven startup. Not at all. Especially not after reading the excellent piece by Alex Payne, One of the key developers of Twitter’s API and one time CTO of Bank Simple, on startup life and all its pros and cons. Read the rest of his blog as he is one hell of a writer (and coder).  Other nice collections of words that made me think include things about Television, formalised dress codes, company transparency, hacked newspapers, innovation classics, typing, two examples of idiot gatekeepers and a story about Sheffield, music drugs and gangsters as a cheery little dessert. And as a little amuse-bouche here is a lovely cartoon that made me smile a bit too knowingly.

Nest of ideas

by the very amusing Mr Wowser

 

Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup

I recently interviewed a young man. I asked him where he wants to be in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he replied. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business. That’s what he had gone to school for, after all.

 

After the Like and After the Spike

In fact, the last 50-60 years have been a blip – a time in which the relationship between storytellers and audiences was effectively broken. We’re coming to the end of that blip now, and we’re seeing a transition as interesting and profound as the beginning of the 20th century, when storytelling moved from the live performance circuits of music hall and variety to the new mass mediums of cinema and broadcasting.

 

A question of clarity and certainty

The company agreed that a small group of senior directors, with an independent fashion adviser, would hear complaints from employees who felt their ties had been unreasonably rejected. Some of these directors were heard to mutter that this was not what they were paid large salaries for. But since no-one knew what they were paid large salaries for, the criticism did not go much further.

 

Buffer’s extreme transparency: inspiring or dystopian?

What would happen if everybody in your company knew everything about your business – your revenue, everyone’s salaries, how the company pitches itself to investors, even how much you slept last night? This might sound like the premise of a sci-fi novel, but it’s what’s happening right now at social media tools startup Buffer, a company with a small, distributed team that takes transparency to extremes.

 

A sobering day

About 10 days ago, the hacker or hackers calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) carried out a very targeted cyberattack against the FT. We’re not the first to be targeted and in fact as I write this we’re not even the most recent. But the experience taught me an important lesson. Targeted attacks against a single large corporation are not like the random, almost embarrassingly fake emails you get telling you to reset your PayPal account. They’re painfully, soberingly realistic. Those that were sent to the FT compromised scores of our corporate Google accounts. And one of those was mine.

 

Innovation: Good Reads On Courage, Diversity, Ecosystems And Principles

Innovation leaders generally operate in a world of “what if”  and must constantly project the consequences and outcomes of complex systems.  And the systems, because they are made up of human beings, tend to be messy, unpredictable, and highly variable. Thomas More shows us the power of narrativizing ideas and principles and the power of “the story” to make real that which is not real.  More important, though, Utopia is a wonderful example of what it means to think about the ecosystem as a whole when thinking about innovation.

 

Innovation

But I immediately blurted out something like, “Innovation is two things. First, you obviously have to spot something that people aren’t doing yet. But second, most importantly, you need to have the courage to do something different than what you’ve grown comfortable doing.”

 

I type, therefore I am

Onscreen, today’s torrents of pixels exceed anything Auden could have imagined. Yet the hyper-verbal loneliness he evoked feels peculiarly contemporary. Increasingly, we interweave our actions and our rolling digital accounts of ourselves: curators and narrators of our life stories, with a matching move from internal to external monologue. It’s a realm of elaborate shows in which status is hugely significant — and one in which articulacy itself risks turning into a game, with attention and impact (retweets, likes) held up as the supreme virtues of self-expression.

 

The Story Behind the WWW Hypertext 91 Demo Page and UNC and me

Not long after, Jim got email from Tim saying that he was submitting a paper on what was now called more briefly WWW at the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference Hypertext 91 in San Antonio in December. Tim made plans to stop by UNC and visit with us before going on to Texas. He was confident given the immediate acceptance of WWW on newsgroups and as seen in his logs that he would get a good speaking slot at the conference. A few weeks later, we learned differently.

 

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title

From: Comedy Script Editor, Light Entertainment, Television
Room No. & Building: 4009 TC
Tel. Ext.: 2900
date: 29.5.1974.

Subject: “FAWLTY TOWERS” BY JOHN CLEESE & CONNIE BOOTH

To: H.C.L.E.

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title. 

It’s a kind of “Prince of Denmark” of the hotel world. A collection of cliches and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.

 

Gangsters, Drugs and Bassline – Sheffield’s war on Music

Niche’s notorious owner Steve Baxendale talks frankly about the rise and fall of Niche. Of how the Sheffield underground rave scene flourished around 1992, the time he set up Niche as an all-night House club. Bought, as one of Sheffield’s many abandoned cutler warehouse, quite different from the luxury brand it became. “Everyone was sick of the commercial clubs and the military regime that they incorporated. They wanted throbbing underground music and to chill out in peace.”

Have a lovely weekend.

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May 31, 2013 Add Comment

Web Curios The Spreadsheet Edition

I assume that everyone reads Matt Muir’s excellent weekly(ish) round up of interesting things from the web that might be slightly related to digital media industries? If not you should go here and subscribe immediately. It is a brilliantly written thing and shows a curious, intelligent humourous and slightly warped mind in all its glory. I am a massive fan of smart people collating interesting things and providing them to me on a plate as I am lazy and it saves me doing anything like work. Web Curios is also a long read and contains a lot of links and this got me wondering how long would it take for a person to consume a whole episode of Web Curios? Every link? Every video? Every thing?

I produce a few similar things to Web Curios both on this blog and at work but nothing quite on the scale or humour or quality of Matt’s rambling delights. At work our team produce a monthly newsletter made up of news, blogs and interesting links that relate to our work/interests. We often ask ourselves how much time do these things take to consume (or delete without reading)? What if you clicked on every link and read every post. If only we had a tool that you could feed a bunch of links and it would give you the answer as if we could come up with some perfect amount of time it should take. Well to the best of my knowledge no such tool exists (it better bloody not do after the amount of work I did on this i.e. about 2 hours).

As a ‘little’ experiment I decided I would have a go at working out how long it would take to consume an entire edition of Web Curios. Instead of actually reading/viewing/playing with it all I made a spreadsheet instead. I chose an edition from a four day working week so in theory it should have been a bit shorter but as I began the task it became clear shortness is relative.  You can find the edition of Web Curios I chose at http://www.imperica.com/news/web-curios-10-05-2013 and you should of course read it from beginning to end (and then let me know how long it took you).

What did I actually do?

The first job (after reading it and enjoying it) was to capture all the links in it. This involved me opening the links, copying them into a Google Docs spreadsheet, giving them a basic categorisation (words, pictures, video, tool etc) and then doing some horribly basic and assumption riddled maths on consumption time. It was a grind of a task but strangely rewarding.

The answer I came up with was as follows…to consume the 10th of May 2013 edition of Web Curious would take 7 hours, 8 minutes and 33 seconds, which is a good chunk of a working day and would probably be better than work. Web Curios itself has over 4,000 words and contains 102 links. The links lead too 57,016 words, 1 hour, 48 minutes and 35 seconds of video, 525 pictures, 9 tools/services, 4 games and a 1 hour and 41 seconds long mix tape to listen too while you do all that reading (you would actually have to listen to it five times though).

This is based on assumptions such as average reading time of 215 words per minute, 3 seconds per picture, a minimum noodling time (technical term) with the tools/sites. I only took into account the first page visited for most links unless it was a multi page article. Like I said basic and assumption riddled. My very rough calculations do not take into account any rabbit hole falling down you may do, any addictive game playing time or time taken to tweet Matt Muir about NSFW links that you were not warned about and opened at work. Thankfully this weeks edition was relatively clean. My normal interactions with Web Curios is to read it all and open some links for reading once I have finished, I assume most people do the same.

I am pretty sure nobody clicks every link (apart from me this week) and consumes every item but I just wanted to put some almost meaningless figure on if they did. I have no conclusion or no great insight into what this means. I would of course like a tool that automates this for my own work, giving Friday Reading posts an average reading time for example would be a nice feature. It was just an idea that had been in my head a while and I wanted it out and there is nothing like the reward of completing an almost pointless task.

You can see that very exciting spreadsheet embedded below or over here if you prefer links/can’t see the embed/want the full interface.

May 13, 2013 Add Comment

Banking conferences are broken…

…and what I would like to do about it.  This is a self-centered post based on my frustration at some banking conferences, it is mainly down the cost of entry but there are a few other issues. This is my attempt to articulate those frustrations and what I would want to see from a banking event effectively designed for me (by me?). Like I said, self centered. I might be making a rather large assumption that anyone other than me would be interested in attending such a thing but a man can dream (albeit a dull one about banking conferences)

That being said, surely it must be possible to put on a decent event about banking that does not cost the earth, is not all bankers in the audience and on stage, covers a broad range of topics about the existing systems, processes, people and the new things trying to improve or destroy them.

 

Expensive by design?

The event that brought this to a head was the recently announced Wired Money conference. It is due to be held this July in Canary Wharf at the financial technology incubator on Level 39 of 1 Canada Square. This relatively new hub of fintech startups is a good signal of the growth and momentum in London in this space. The event has a great line up of speakers (Kevin Slavin being a big draw) with the majority being based in the UK and a few being flown in from the US and Europe. My main problem is the cost. £995 for a one day conference. Now of course if anyone involved wants to offer me a freebie I am hypocritical enough to accept it gleefully.

Another great conference that the cost of irks me is Finovate. This year a ticket was £1100 for two days made up of 7 minute demos by fintech startup companies. These companies also have to pay to present. I am glad Finovate came to London a couple of years ago, their main conferences are in San Francisco and New York, and they have helped raised the profile  of the UK and European Fintech scene. That being said it is still prohibitively expensive for me.

Next week we have another example – Customer Experience in Financial Services. A strong lineup of senior banking folk talking about exciting things like ‘deepening customer relationships through face-to-face interaction’ and ‘Engaging the millennial generation’ and while I am sure it will be a fine conference I doubt there will be any customers there to talk too face to face or any millennials who can afford to attend.  So will it just be assumptions about what they like and want? Just £1000 for a ticket or £1600 if you want to attend day two as well, Social Media in Financial Services. I am sure it will be a good conference I am just venting now.

I know conferences have to make money or there is no point hosting them but it feels like these banking conferences are being priced at such a level the price tag means prestige or only senior executives can afford to attend. While I fully understand these influential folk are key to making the changes needed to banking or having the budget to invest in some of these startup companies it feels like there is an air of exclusivity which does nothing to change the attitude to banking for the better. Some of the new finance events feel more like ‘Let’s get all the cool kids of new finance to parade their wares and ideas in front of the kingmakers’.

There are of course good examples in banking. Last years Next Bank Europe event last year in Rome had a great lineup with speakers coming from all over the world and the ticket was 300 euros. It is bordering on the expensive but a damn sight more affordable than those already mentioned, even with a flight and hotel in Rome. BarCampBank London now in its sixth year was held the day before Finovate and the price was the princely sum of £10.  Now there were sponsors and a few favours pulled but profit was not the driving factor. (UPDATE: Dave Birch, the organiser of BarCampBank London messaged me to say the ticket money was also donated to charity ‘We sent £685.34 to Jubilee Action for their work with street children in Kenya and with former child soldiers in Uganda‘). Last year’s TEDxLeeds had a new finance focus and for a shortish evening event managed to pull together a good selection of speakers for not much money.

The two one day conferences I have been able to afford to attend this year, The Design of Understanding and The Story have been excellent and the combined cost of tickets for both was just over £200. The people behind these conferences, Max Gadney and Matt Locke respectively, are very talented, smart and respected in their fields and they clearly have great taste in choosing interesting topics around their chosen themes of information design and narrative. They are choosing talks they want to hear talk over and above making money.

 

Pass the tissues

‘Oh boohoo poor little mid management banker can’t afford to go to conferences, my heart bleeds’ Yes, yes I can imagine there is very little sympathy for me but all I want is an event that tries to bridge the worlds of new and old but also opens the door to others that may be interested. At a price I can afford to go to as well. We have a wealth of digital talent in the UK and I feel like the majority are not engaged in any meaningful way with ‘banking and financial services’ over and above their day to day use, complaining about the deficiencies of their Internet banking offerings or doing great redesigns hoping the banks will notice. I want to get hackers, designers, writers, makers whatever in to a room to listen, learn, contribute and get excited about the future of finance.

As I said before we have some great things happening in London. Great companies like TransferWise and OpenGamma are leading the way. The London based Anthemis Group have their laser like eyes focused on investing in the best of the best with a view to redesigning and replacing the banking systems so they are fit for tomorrow not struggling to be fit for today. Sean Park of Anthemis has a great line about this momentum shift.

“We are starting to see a Cambrian explosion of new ventures, new companies, entrepreneurs focusing on this space. The fruit maybe high on the tree but it is enormous and juicy”

He is right, we are seeing a change and it is exciting to bank geeks like me. How do we get people outside the industry to learn more about this? Get more people eyeing up that fruit?

For me John Kay’s 2009 book titled ‘The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren’t in the Industry’ sums it up perfectly, although I would of course like to see people from the industry in the audience.

 

Aircraft engines & ‘opaqueness’

The other thing I would want from my dream event is not just about the new and the innovative. I want to know more about the existing system. There was a great quote recently from Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan when he was challenged by Paul Singer that their accounting was unfathomable.

“Businesses can be opaque. They are complex. You don’t know how aircraft engines work either.”

When I say great quote I mean it was a great insight into the attitude of some in banking. You might not know how aircraft engines work but they are built by multiple providers and that is repeatable. We can build new ones that improve on the old ones. That is not so easy when applied to the bank network.

There are many vast and complex systems that make up the banking world and they are systems we use every single day and impact our lives in ways we may never think about but it is fascinating. How is a cheque actually cleared? How on earth does an ATM work? How is a debit card made (I want a video like this please)? What the hell is a complex derivative? There are so many elements of the banking system that are understood by so few (including some people that work for banks i.e. me).

Contrast the comment by Mr Dimon with this one by Ben Milne of Dwolla.

“Payment networks should have a memory. You absolutely should be able to login to Visa.com and see every transaction you have ever engaged in with a Visa card. The fact that you can’t do this is ridiculous.”

For those with  a modicum of banking / card issuing knowledge might laugh at the naivety of this statement i.e. the Visa cards are issued by a number of other companies and as such Visa should have no way of tieing all this data together. This only shows how brilliant web thinking is when applied to the historic models that make no sense to new generations, of course you should be able to search every transaction you have ever made. Just the ability to search a years worth of transactions would be a massive leap forward for most financial institutions.

 

Dream event

So…after all that rambling what I would love to have is an annual event aimed at those that just have an interest in banking and finance and where it is today and where it is going. Hosted away from the steel and glass of the Wharf and somewhere a bit friendlier like Conway Hall, the venue for The Story and another excellent conference, This Is Playful. With a price that makes it accessible to more than those with tailored suits and handmade shoes but for anyone who already works in this area or just people who are interested in learning more. It should be neither focused on banker bashing or bankers only but a happy medium that can hopefully foster soemthing approaching coherent debate.

I would like to hear Joris Luyendijk’s stories about all the real bankers he interviewed and get past media stereotypes (or confirm them), or how about some people who try to circumvent the banking processes for their own gains (no, not bankers), James Bridle talking about the design and architecture of data centres alongside someone who actually designs them, Pelle Braendgaard on OpenTransact and can open source code really replace the banking network etc. etc.

My initial Twitter rant caught the eyes of a few people who were willing to offer advice and help so we will see what they say after reading this rambling word spew. My partner is about to give birth to our second child so I will have no time until May to think about this but in my humble opinion the best time to hold it would be the Thursday after Finovate as there are plenty of new finance types around which could give a head start for speakers and attendees. Finovate London has traditionally been in mid-February so it also gives a bit of time to get things organised if there is enough interest. Feel free to leave any thoughts below especially if you think this is a good idea and what you would want to see from such a conference if you do.

March 4, 2013 14 Comments

Friday Reading #6 (New Year Edition)

Another year has arrived. 2013 will see me turn 37 years of age. This weeks links seemed to fall into categories that I want to concentrate on this year.  I am at a bit of a career crossroads and I feel like I need to pick a direction instead of ambling along blindly. We will see how that works out. Here are the links accompanied by some rambling about why and what etc. eBook bundle readlist link is here

 

I want to make more stuff in 2013. I spend a bit too much time writing and talking and not enough time making. Too many reckons and not enough prototypes & products. You can’t really learn if you don’t make.

 

Unbored: The Power of ‘Making’ in the Classroom

‘Making mistakes and trying again and again (and often again) until you succeed also encourages what’s now being called a “prototyper’s mind,” an asset that many experts believe will be key to the 21st century job market, where the majority of careers today’s kids will pursue have yet to be invented.’

 

And in related news this great piece by Matt Edgar looks at how marketing agencies are increasingly trying their hands at making products with mixed results.

 

Ad agencies are discovering products like Columbus discovered America

‘Making things is hard, especially things to last, things that people will find useful in their everyday lives. And often people used to marketing things underestimate this.’

 

I am intrigued by products launched in alpha/beta publicly and how they progress. Banks are not great at this. Things hae to be perfect first time, or at least perceived that way internally. Why not launch things earlier  See what they might become?  This interview with  Babak Parvis of the Google Glass project is an interesting read on where they are with Glass and how fluid it all is.

 

Google Glass Features and Apps Still in Flux

‘We constantly try out new ideas of how this platform can be used. There’s a lot of experimentation going on at all times in Google. We’re also trying to make the platform more robust. This includes making the hardware more robust and the software more robust, so we can ship it to developers early this year.’

 

One of the thing I really need to improve on is not letting power mad little Hitlers frustrate me so much with their ‘computer/rules/I say no’ attitude. They have a job to do and I need to respect that. I also need to stop calling people power mad little Hitlers. Anyway it seems like Jeff Bezos has similar(ish) problems. I also love the focus on platforms and self service. Allowing/empowering people to build what they want is real innovation.

 

‘Even Well-Meaning Gatekeepers Slow Innovation’

‘I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” writes Bezos. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what – many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.’

 

Data, data, data will be a big focus next year. I am intrigued to see the progress of MiData in the UK as control of data is handed back to the people who create it. The companies that embrace this will show themselves to be in tune with the evolution of the web/world. The quantified self movement (is it a movement…well the fitness stuff kind of is in more ways than one) is a rich source of data and a rich source of frustration….a bit like banking. It is not that easy to get data out of some of these tracking devices. I also need to get fitter as I begin 2013 at I think my heaviest ever weight. The original article by Dan Hon on using data to get healthier earlier this year was one of the best things I read. A new version of the article was in Domus at the end of the year as well so allows me to add it in this bumper roundup.

 

Fitness By Design

‘The last six months have given me a deep, visceral insight into what it means to experiment with personal informatics. In a word, the best way to describe how this explosion of health data works is “messily”.’

 

As well as exercising my body I need to exercise my mind more thoroughly, less constant consumption of tweets and blogs and more well chosen long form reading. Bruce Sterling’s back catalogue would be included in this. His recent ‘State Of The World’ conversation with Jon Lebkowsky is fascinating stuff.

 

Topic 459: State of the World 2013: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky

‘I like the “Quantified Self” trend — I’d certainly like to know moreabout what’s going on in my own body. It doesn’t seem fair that it’s such an unknown world in there, wilder and lesser-known than the Amazon. But I wonder what will happen when this practice mainstreams, and becomes less of a fringe hobby for numerate Yankee geeks.’

 

Another area I feel I should research more is the classic innovation case studies, revisit Clayton Christensen’s work for example. I think we have a major innovation failure case study playing out right now with Nokia and this recent article gives a good overview of what on earth has gone so wrong.

 

Innovate Or Die: Nokia’s Long-Drawn-Out Decline

‘So where did it all go wrong for Nokia? The cause of the company’s decline looks very simple with hindsight: Nokia should have moved off its smartphone platform Symbian and onto its next-generation platform, MeeGo, much sooner than it did. Years sooner.’

 

I also have an interest in marketing. I wonder why most of it is so shit. Why is it so focused on making us buy more things? It is ruining a whole host of major web services as they have to live up to those wild valuations and the new share holders demand dollars and cents. This sums it up perfectly.

 

Unnatural Acts And The Rise Of Mobile

‘A major symptom of the frenzy to monetize is that previously platform-centric products are reverting to destination-site thinking. Twitter’s adoption of media embedding, Instagram’s decision to pull its content from Twitter, Facebook’s launch of Poke and Google’s failure to add a write API to its G+ platform all display an “own the user” mentality.’ 

 

Going back to the making things theme, I wish I was a designer. I failed the subject horribly at school. (I vaguely remember a horrific football stadium I ‘designed’) I would like to try again. It is such an over looked/misunderstood thing in the world of banking. This piece by Aral Balkan is focused on a particular type of design i.e. web, as it is in response to an article that seems to have tickled his ire but I think it covers my feelings on the approach to design by most banks.

 

‘Design is not veneer’

‘None of us are born designers. It is not a talent. It has very little to do with being able to draw well or make things look pretty (we are talking about design here, not illustration). The way something looks is not veneer layered on top of its functionality. The two are inextricably linked. The way a thing looks creates inherent expectations about how it is meant to be used. This is called an affordance.’

 

And finally, thankfully, I would like to do less this year. I would like to have a more singular focus instead of getting distracted like a fat child in a sweet shop. This…

 

I want less for Christmas

‘Less judgments. I mentioned this before. But everytime I find myself thinking: “Jojo is an idiot!” I’m going to replace the exclamation point with a question mark. “Jojo is an idiot?” I want to walk around the world in a constant state of bewilderment.’

 

and this…

 

The magic of doing one thing at a time

‘Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.’

 

And that is that. I have been finding myself drawn to the famous quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery ‘A goal without a plan is just a wish’ let’s see if I get beyond these being just wishes. Happy 2013.

January 4, 2013 Add Comment

Friday Reading #5

It is difficult not to just fill the reading list with articles about the Newtown massacre as it has brought out some fantastic writers making seemingly in arguable points about America’s unbelievably stupid gun laws. Thankfully Jason Kottke is doing a marvellous job of collating all the best pieces on his blog. Go and read them. I will stay a bit more ‘on brand’ and focus on the less important technology and innovation stuff. Here are the links in a handy cut out and keep tablet/reading device friendly format. Merry Xmas etc.

 

Lamps: a design research collaboration with Google Creative Labs, 2011

‘We were both curious about how it would feel to have Google in the world with us, rather than on a screen.

If Google wasn’t trapped behind glass, what would it do?

What would it behave like?

How would we react to it?’

 

Clayton Christensen, On The Entrepreneurial Innovations Our Economy Needs

‘Our current economy, however, has gone off of the rails in large part because we are focused almost entirely on efficiency innovations—on streamlining and wringing bottom line savings and additional profits out of our existing organizations.’

 

Rebuilding The Web We Lost

‘We took it as a self-evident and obvious goal that people would even want to participate in this medium, instead of doing the hard work necessary to make it a welcoming and rewarding place for the rest of the world.’

 

Programming Your Culture

 

‘…all desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from The Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $100+ billion market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon.’

 

The End Of Leadership

 

‘But over time, I have become suspicious and bitter about these perfectly casted people. In many organisations I have seen how cheer-“leaders” joyfully smile in the face of their subordinates and at the same time put a knife in the back of the same human beings.’

 

Reblogs and content sharing on Tumblr: a personal network analysis

‘Tumblr Analytics does exist, but not for ordinary users […] This leaves Tumblr a kind of “here be dragons” among social networks, which is unusual in an age so obsessed with them. That is, its social norms are not known; there isn’t any data about how its users behave and use the network. ‘

 

Are We Becoming Cyborgs?

‘I think one of the most human tendencies is to want to have a concrete answer and a quantifiable measure of everything. And when we deal with degrees of abstraction, which is what any new technology in essence compels us to do, it can be very uncomfortable.’

 

And seeing as it is Xmas…

 

Diagnosing the Home Alone burglars’ injuries: A professional weighs in

‘Assuming Harry doesn’t lose the hand completely, he will almost certainly have other serious complications, including a high risk for infection and ‘contracture’ in which resulting scar tissue seriously limits the flexibility and movement of the hand, rendering it less than 100 percent useful. Kevin has moved from ‘defending his house’ into sheer malice, in my opinion.’

December 21, 2012 Add Comment

People sharing photos of cards online are not idiots…

…they might just be your increasingly rare fans.

A few weeks back a new service started on twitter. @NeedADebitCard collated all the finest photos from the Internet taken by people keen to share their debit/credit card details and design with the world. The instant reaction to this by most sane individuals is ‘what are you doing you idiots?!’ Banking fraud departments across the globe probably tutted and cursed and then smiled as people proved what they already assume every day, the weakest link in online security is the one between the chair and the screen. Online commentators had a field day spouting off about the obvious dangers of this. My initial reaction was the same for about 5 minutes then I realised that these people are just using social media for its greatest use case, sharing everything. They might not be your most stupid customers but your most loyal, your most proud and in these current times banks need all the fans they can get.

The problems associated with sharing photos of your plastic payment device are actually the making of the financial institutions themselves. The Internet has been with us for 20 years. Social media in its current very easy to use incarnation probably 5-7 years old. Payment cards have been with us since the 60s and in that time they have not really changed a great deal. The bottom line is that they are not really fit for use on the Internet.

Outdated payment methods

These physical tokens of my relationship with a bank contain almost every bit of information a person needs to make card holder not present purchase from the web or via the telephone. The industry has tried to bolt on solutions to alleviate this problem e.g. the 3 digit security number on the signature strip (No one is idiotic enough to take a photo of the front and back of their card are they?) but you enter these details into a site every time you need to pay, effectively giving away the keys to your house every time you buy something via remote channels. Should the sites we buy from do more? Do ecommerce sites have PCI DSS compliance badges that they share with pride? ‘We keep your data safe’. Maybe the site owners should take a smiling photo of themselves holding their PCI DSS compliance certificate and put it on Instagram. Of course there are numerous protection standards in place around ecommerce sites I am being a tad facetious to make a point.

What of other solutions such as the universally loved 3D secure methods like Verified by Visa and Mastercard Secure. Yes they stop a certain kind of fraud but how many purchases are cancelled because of these things? How many swearwords are uttered when asked for an infrequently used password? What we need are payment methods designed for the web, designed to be used for one transaction or that just leave the merchant knowing who I pay via but not needing every single piece of detail to make further purchases.

I mean why do credit/debit cards need my full name printed on them? This is about digital identity and you would do well to watch Dave Birch’s recent talk on that subject. Dave is a man who signs his card transactions Carlos Tevez so he knows when people are trying to make fraudulent purchases. 

Social objects of banking.

(Bank) simple have just started sending out invites to their long time registered straining at the leash future customers. The effort and design they have put into their card will mean you will be seeing a lot of photos of these cards over the coming months. They had the foresight to package the cards with a thick blue rubber band holding the card in place but also to obscure the card details making easy to photograph and share the fact they are now proud (bank) simple customers.

Simple realise that the card is an important social object of their customers relationship with them and they wanted to make sure as many of them as possible would share that fact. They also realize the risk and warn their customers accordingly (while still encouraging unboxing photos) Traditional banks would not want you sharing the fact you bank with them online for fear of things like spear phishing yet one of the most used metrics in bank satisfaction is ‘Would you recommend your bank to your friends?’.

I have written about the social objects of banking in the past and I think they are massively underused in an industry that makes talking about your banking relationship and money in general seem massively taboo. This really should not be the case.

Idiots?

So before you go jumping to conclusions about customers who post pictures of their cards on social networks, think long and hard about why they are doing this and why in 2012 the details needed to make a payment online are printed on a small piece of plastic that everyone can see. Who are the real idiots?

This post origianlly appeared on Finextra http://www.finextra.com/community/FullBlog.aspx?blogid=6779

July 23, 2012 Add Comment

Burdened by ideas

*SOUND THE NAVEL GAZING ALARM* While writing my last post on PFMs I was struck by how certain ideas and themes recur in my writing and thinking. I am starting to get the feeling I am burdened by these ideas. My brilliance is being hampered by these synapse occupying visions of majesty so much so that my humility has been diminished. Self mockery aside the real reason they are a burden is due to the lack of progress I have made with turning them from ideas stuck in my head to anything resembling reality. I wrote about the problem with ideas stuck in my head last year and one of the ideas I will talk about in this post is one of the ones I refferred to. In that post I said I wanted to protect the idea:

[I] 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.

It of course got killed. For this and other reasons I have decided it is time for me to publish these oh so burdensome ideas. Be rid of these foul demons in the vain hope that someone agrees they are good ideas and has some sort of vision of how to make them reality. These ideas are of various ages and I think this list is probably in oldest first order.

 

Identity – Clearly this is a huge topic and I am interested in all facets of identity but the bothersome idea I have harboured for several years is why can’t I logon to my bank website? Yes I can log on to Internet Banking but that is different. For most banks the website is a completely different entity to its online banking portal. If I want to save a quote, view the terms of my insurance policy and potentially view my balances I should not need full strength security and validation. All quite subjective with regards to how secure different types of interaction should be but access to some forms of interactions need to be simpler (it could be argued that it’s the customers choice as to what level of security they desire). Also you have the whole personalisation angle (only show me adverts for relevant products, paint the site black if I am a certain grade of customer etc) to this but I am not so interested in that.

Some banks operate other logons on their websites or external parts of their site such as the logon for HSBC’s Advance offers  or the first direct lab. I suspect interactions here are not well linked to customer profiles or CRM systems because of these logon issues. They also require yet another user ID and password which everyone loves.

What about non-customers visiting a banks site? Why not have a level of registration/identity to allow people to research products, begin applications and then once they take out a product you can upgrade the logon to a level that allows more secure transactions? Don’t make me fully authenticate for everything and don’t leave tracking to cookies and chance for everything else.

Clearly identity is a much bigger thing but I don’t want to get into all that NSTIC / Digital Asset Grid type stuff just yet or even the connection of social network identities or the thought of Klout scores linked to product offerings (shudder). I just want basic federated logons for bank websites and any 3rd party sites the bank operates.

 

Notification Systems – I have written quite a detailed post on this idea a while back. The bottom line is that in banking today there are many types of events that occur but very few of those events are subject to any form of tailored notification to me as a customer especially if they are not financial transactions. If a specific transaction arrives in my account can I be notified via SMS? If my account balance drops below a certain limit can I get a DM on Twitter? If I miss a call from my RM can I be notified via email? If my mortgage application progresses to the next milestone can I get a message sent to my Internet Fridge? If someone tries to logon from a country or using a device that is not mine can you alert me via every channel available? (why don’t banks have an audit trail that the user can see showing their logon activity ala Gmail?) Today the notifications available to customers are fairly limited. Maybe some basic SMS or some notifications inside a mobile app. The tailoring of them is also limited. No creation of rules or choice of multiple notification channels.

Not only does this limit the amount of feedback loops a bank creates it means the banks miss an opportunity to engage with customers. This thing has happened with your product…you should take some action (and hopefully see this advert for new stuff).

Over and above this though is that these notifications and these events that have occurred are fuel for other services both inside and outside the bank. Imagine if your bank had systems that played together nicely in ways you could manage. Imagine if you had the equivalent of If This Then That for your bank(s). The events and notifications are ripe for bringing your bank activities into your digital world rather than keeping them all locked away in an internet banking portal.

 

Activity Streams – (This is kind of the one referred to earlier that got killed off) Basically these are a well known form of viewing data and capturing specific forms of interaction. The Facebook newsfeed is probably the most well known form of activity stream. A flowing river of events that have occurred in your network. Why isn’t your bank relationship represented like that? Today it is split by account, then drill down into a list of transactions. That view is of course important but it shows little of the actual interactions. Why not have an activity stream of all actions across all products and services? For example why not show entries such as;

    • You called today and we have done the following things
    • You left a comment on the first direct lab
    • You have won a prize for being our bestest customer
    • We have replied to your complaint about your prize (See our response)
    • We tried to cold call you but you ignored our call
    • You have been chosen for a fantastic new marketing promotion
    • etc

These would be interspersed with the far more frequent and familiar account transactions but it shows you everything that happens across your relationship with your bank. This representation may also change the way you present transactions as more data could be added such as geolocation, images of cheques, call recordings, 3rd party offers etc

Activity Streams are also a blossoming open standard.  You can post events in the activity stream format and then build a stream of those events across any service. If all banking relationship notifications/events mentioned in section two were formatted into activity streams it would allow those events to be brought together more simply in a single place, easing front end integration but also should you so desire allow you to share them outside your bank. This presentation by one of the contributors to the Activity Streams standard, Chris Messina of Google, explains them brilliantly. What if banks extended the standard from it’s current social network definition? A bank contributing to open standards? Crazy talk…

Again this idea is about linking things together. Bringing events from a multitude of systems into one stream. Also enabling the linkage of bank events into wider world of web services.

 

Open Data & Application Programming Interfaces –  This is my current brain occupier. The one thing I would like banks to embrace the most. I have written about these things many times both inside and outside of the organisation I work for but like Robin S said ‘words are so easy to say’.  I wrote about them here, here and here.  Basically what I want to see is banks surface APIs for core functions. An API for my transactions that I could plug into other services ala Freeagent, An API for payments so a developer could code an app to send money to people ala PayPal X Commerce etc. The very smart James Governor said a while back that he believed API creation and management will be a core skill of the successful enterprises of the future. He is right. We are starting to see a bit of a groundswell around financial services APIs, albeit mainly from new entrants. That will change soon hopefully as the banks wake up to the potential of bridging the gap between the bank network and the web.

Open Data is very similar in that instead of publishing services it is about publishing things that have happened. Banks should have some cracking data sets that could be shared for the benefit of others. Not least the hackers and tinkers and visualisers etc. If the World Bank can do it (and do it well) why can’t some of the other banks of the world do it?

 

Conclusion of sorts – The main themes here are related to some sort of connective tissue of banking and the web. You can tell I am not a TOGAF certified architect with those kinds of descriptions. I am always disappointed when something can’t be connected to something else for what ever crappy reason ‘It was too expensive to build it like that’ ‘IT Security wouldn’t let us’ ‘It was planned for phase 2’ ‘Open standards are a legal minefield so we write better ones’ ‘What the hell are you on about tubby?! Only activity stream you need is to go swimming’ etc

I understand these things are potentially major infrastructural changes and there is also an unhealthy dose of mindset changes required as well. Both these things notoriously complex, challenging and expensive. I have no mind for business models or numbers related to these kinds of things so could not put a price on such a thing.  I suspect they will cost a fortune to build but will they deliver the savings needed to justify them? Will they allow innovation and creativity to flourish in the way my Utopian visions say they will. Who knows? I believe they will but who will believe me without Return On Investment numbers and other dull figures of justification?

My failings (of which there are many) are that I don’t really know how to make things/make things happen (this could be a whole new navel gazing post). I know how to do whiny blog posts and sarcastic presentations and that ain’t working so well for these kinds of ideas (I am being  flippant but I really don’t know how to start these things). Obviously a problem shared is a problem halved so this is my attempt at that.

Be Gone. Maybe it is time to drown the puppy. Arrogantly accept the fact my ideas are clearly far too ahead of their time/not in anyway realistic. Move on. Seek out new ideas in new areas far away from these and rid myself of this (not very heavy) burden. This is the first step towards that…publish away my problems. I will of course be right back to them the moment anyone shows the merest flicker of interest because I suspect the only real way to rid myself of this burden is to see these things, or better solutions, implemented.

June 7, 2012 2 Comments

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

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 31st 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 21st 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 21st century which is exactly what the Government Digital Service looks like.

 

February 5, 2012 4 Comments

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