The world according to Andrew

I had the pleasure of attending the London chapter of the Creative Mornings series of talks this morning. The speaker was the ever interesting (and wow very pregnant with twins) Beeker Northam from the agency Denstu London. I’ve been following Beeker and her team closely for the last 18 months or so as they as a company are very much aligned with my vision of work environment based on invention (we also have loads of friends in common).

There were a load of interesting references in her talk that I am going to have to follow up on over the next few days and one point in particular she made about the loss of craft in our industry due to the rise of the big idea and outsourcing to cut and shut production houses certainly rang true with me (as did the concept of Cultural Steam).

All in all a great talk. That said it was a bit of an advert for Dentsu and Berg. I was a bit too chicken to ask questions at the end but i’m fascinated by the PR and self promotion ability of these two companies and their friends. I love how they all point to each other all the time and how they knit each others ideas and concepts into their work and the amplification effect that this has. Berg themselves recently published an article about how they use video to communicate their ideas and much of what they said alluded to this.

I believe a video will be made available soon but once again thanks to Beeker, good luck with the babies in the next couple of months and thanks to the creative mornings London team for putting the event on.

That was the title of a recent BBC News article about the current lack of interest in Computer Science among UK students. It’s also the slogan of a new campaign aimed at getting school kids interested in computer science and programming. Well I don’t know about you but I can’t think of a worse slogan to boost interest – I hated latin at school and i’ve used < 10% (see what I did there) of what I learnt since I left school. Is coding a dead language? I don’t think so. Firstly coding by it’s nature is a collection of languages, algorithms, techniques. Maybe you could say “Cobol – the new latin” but Scala, Javascript, Objective-C, C++, Java etc etc. I don’t think so – one of the wonders of programming is the sheer variety of subsets and supersets of languages and approaches.

I’ve written at length in the past about the need to make coding and computer science more interesting to children. I think it’s really, really important, but I don’t think this campaign is going to do much to inspire them.

There have been suggestions made in the past by others about how this talent drain might be stemmed. I’m fully behind the various calls to use outputs such as computer games to garner interest for example. However, i’d also love to see teachers look towards the semantic web, the internet of things, robotics, automation (just look at bigdog, the google car etc etc) and the concepts of a connected society to inspire and enthuse the next generation of technologists (btw, it’s NOT just programming, that’s like saying when I grow up I want to be a hammer operator).

Perhaps the real problem is with the quality of teachers and their depth of experience, I would wager very few come from industry – maybe they don’t deserve that pension (i’m generalising and don’t mean to offend)? I also really don’t care too much about the current discussions about getting more girls involved in tech. To me it all boils down to making the topic interesting, getting the right teachers to inspire, exploring the breadth of what technology means and making the topic more accessible (fingers crossed for Rasperry PI). Then the right people will choose their career path because they are passionate, interested and engaged. The focus should’t be on gender – if it were then there should be a campaign to get more male beauty therapists (again, i’m being glib).

Finally, the fact that there’s a lot of early technologists approaching retirement age, looking at their achievements, their careers and most importantly, their legacies can only help push this forward and if I can do my bit, I will.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the newly released Jawbone UP. The pre-release buzz sounded really promising. A wearable device that synced with an iPhone that provided some personal telemetry data visualised through an accompanying app. It looks like a great start – the design was great too – with the device being a single unit including a 3.5mm jack for syncing built in. My worry at the time was that the accompanying software looked, well like a bit of an afterthought really. And it seems as though I may have been right. There’s are lots of reports coming from around the internet of limited features and buggy syncing.

It got me thinking about the importance of the conduits and outputs (and outcomes) in the Internet of things concept. All of these connected devices, transmitting their data, elegantly, continuously is all well and good but it’s how the data is interpreted and used that’s important. It sounds obvious (and is) but was clearly forgotten in this case. Hopefully Jawbone will work to make improvements in future versions.

Each day in the G2 section of the Guardian is a question to which readers are invited to respond. A couple of days ago the question was “When did people start calling the Railway station the Train station?”

There was no direct answer in the paper, however it got me thinking about how we might solve this. I’ve been toying with the Google NGram viewer for a few weeks now and it seemed like the perfect tool for the job. The NGram viewer allows you to see language trends based on the occurrences of words in the documents that Google has scanned over time.

You can see from the graph above that Train station came into modern prose in the 1940′s and became to norm in about 1999 give or take. Interestingly Railway station has had a bit of a resurgence since the Millenium while Train station has declined slightly. No idea why. I wonder what it’s called in Harry Potter?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about games for commuters. More specifically how there doesn’t really seem to be any that require any kind of interaction with those around you. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Many people in close proximity, in my case for 45 minutes at a time with little to do and a mobile phone in their hand.

A bit of observational research over the last week has shown me that most people have a mobile of some kind, Blackberry, iPhone or Android and most use them for either playing a game of some kind (95% Angry Birds), sending SMS messages, reading email or looking at Twitter. All of these devices are capable of bluetooth, have GPS and, where it’s available, are internet connected (3G in the UK is rubbish at the best of times but on a moving train skipping between cell’s you might as well just not bother). In fact the number of people glued to their mobile devices for their entire journey is staggering.

A year or so ago I drew up a prototype for a Bluetooth transmitter that could be attached to trains magnetically and that could then be used by brands to broadcast to mobile devices used by commuters, an ideal tool for advertising or streaming in movie trailers etc (these days it could be a wi-fi hotspot rather than Bluetooth). Unfortunatly it also looked like a bomb and with all the bad things going on in the world I didn’t fancy causing a full scale terror alert by carrying out a field test. I still think the idea is sound, although the idea has evolved into one where the phones act as a grid to manage the game where certain devices act as super nodes brokering game data etc in a similar way to which Skype works. It’s on my projects list to prototype in the coming months.

I’ve also started to think a little about what a game mechanic in this area might look like. Imagine if tribes of commuters could play against each other, say the 7.30 from Milton Keynes plays the 5.50 from Manchester, economies could be set up, goods farmed and bartered, battles fought (perhaps for who sits and who stands) I think the scope for this is pretty wide and the opportunities for gamifying the commute many..

The problem I can see though is that commuters don’t really seem to interact with each other, commuting despite the proximity to others seems to be a very solitary activity. I’ve travelled with many of the same people every day, twice a day for the last ten years. I don’t know any of there names and we don’t really even acknowledge we’ve seen each other before. Perhaps this is an opportunity to use technology to change that. In fact on the list is a future blog post about using technology to enable people to interact with strangers as it’s something i’ve been thinking about for a while – why do I never say hello to the woman I see in the coffee shop queue every single morning, why does the man on the platform never say good morning? I know I want to but feel I can’t.

Anyway for now commuters seem happy with the latest iteration of Angry Birds so I guess I have some time :)

After a long hiatus there’s a couple of quotes from me in an article about planning web projects the latest issue of .Net Magazine. Not quite word for word what I said but close enough :) Overall an interesting article with some good insight into how agencies plan their sites.

I was fortunate enough to attend a panel discussion this evening on the future of (written word) publishing. It was brilliantly attended by many UK publishers, startups, industry groups and academics (notably though no authors, magazine publishers or device manufacturers). The outcome of tonight’s panel discussion is to be a paper on the future of publishing, the challenges, the areas ripe for innovation and strategy for the future. I got quite vocal (unusual for me – no really) about the value of the content and content strategy and the over focus on platform. A couple of the panelists disagreed with what I was saying – strangely these tended to be the technologists rather than the publishers which surprised me a little. Challenges wise there did seem to be a few common strains that came out I can’t really discuss here as it wouldn’t be fair – we’ll have to wait for the paper but it’s safe to say ROI, rights management and comparison to the music industry made appearances.

My eyes were opened to the various publishing sectors, academic publishing, medical, children’s etc etc, along with the nervousness about platforms and most notably failure. The notion of failing fast and building on the learning’s is seen as a massive risk and not many people are doing it (read none) – not even with long tail content.

Anyway loads to think about and the depth of expertise in the room was incredible – I made some new acquaintances, have to follow up with a few people and booked a few coffee’s for the n

We hosted the London flash platform group meetup yesterday evening.  There were two presentations. David Kinross did a really interesting overview of AlivePDF and shared some of his experience implementing it. My colleague Tadhg and I presented a talk about developing for kids and families and covered some of the techniques we use both in identifying the various stages of child development and some of the tools we’ve put in place to ensure we can create high quality software targeted at young people.

I was a bit worried about the content as it was quite heavily focused on what we do as a company and the hard work we’ve put into our tools and process rather than purely academic but it was really well received, in fact we had a fab time and met loads of great, smart people. Thanks to everyone who came and I think a video of the talks is going to be posted online soon.

Over the years I’ve never really blogged much – i’ve tried, but I get bored really quickly either with the content or the design and normally nuke and start again after a couple of months. I also worry I don’t really have anything interesting to say – i’m just adding to the noise of the Internet. All that said, I do feel like I want to write so  I’ve decided to make a real effort to get back into blogging. I want to improve my writing style and try out a few of the SEO techniques I have been recommending to clients for the last few years. Cory Doctorow (Author of With a Little Help, For the Win, Makers, and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) suggests the following when it comes to improving your writing. I’m taking his advice.

1. Write every day. Anything you do every day gets easier. If you’re insanely busy, make the amount that you write every day small (100 words? 250 words?) but do it every day.
2. Write even when the mood isn’t right. You can’t tell if what you’re writing is good or bad while you’re writing it.
3. Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
4. Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.
5. Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

Turns out that when Adobe puts their minds to things rather than just getting upset with Apple they can do some interesting things. Last month they released a prototype extension to CSS that they’ve contributed to webkit called CSS regions. It’s a way for developers to get closer to magazine style formatting, even for fluid layouts.

You can read about it in the documentation from Adobe here. So when will this appear in Safari? Well probably not soon but Google are on board so we may well see it in a future release of Chrome.