One of the students in the session I taught on Wednesday night – a super-bright 21 year old working for a startup – said he’s grown frustrated with the attitudes in the startup community, which always seem to demand a quite narrow “value proposition” defined more in business terms than in human terms. I’ve noticed this too of course, and …
Uber: another side to the story (part 2) [post 24/100]
Yesterday I started a post about what lies under the usual Uber arguments. Today it continues… 4. Uber shows you (the gaps in) the local market In London, UberEx is almost always a better experience than the local minicab company. Having spoken to loads of Uber drivers, I now know that the best of them are refugees from the minicab …
Uber: another side to the story (part 1) [post 23/100]
I can’t seem to get away from Uber lately – if it’s not another article on its disruptive genius or its double-digit-billions valuation, it’s another article about its equally disruptive misogyny. While both of these are valid discussions, I think there’s more to the picture than I see in a lot of the stories about the former (I’m not arguing …
Mysterious switches and other design phenomena [post 22/100]
I spent last night in one of my favourite hotels. As always, the bed was super-comfy, the room was beautifully appointed, the service was friendly and all was very comfortable. I appreciated, as I always do, the presence of not only power plugs but also USB ports at either side of the headboard – you’d be amazed at how few …
My Tivo is trying to make me gay* [post 20/100]
I’d like to revisit the topics of personalisation and etiquette in digital services. Over the last 2 days I’ve posted a couple of things about beacons, their potential and also their pitfalls, and I’ve had some feedback across a range of channels that tells me further discussion is warranted about opting in and preferences and user control and all those …
Internet of neighbourhoods, part 1 [post 19/100]
In 2012 and 2013, Martin and I did a couple of workshops on the topic of Smart cities, taking a bit of an unconventional approach. Most Smart Cities projects that I’m aware of concentrate primarily on infrastructure, transport and security, with a bit of commercial enablement on the side. They don’t seem to spend a lot of time on the …
Beacon blues [post 18/100]
I’ve been reading an increasing number of articles lately about how the Internet of Things is going to transform the retail industry. the specific thing that gets mentioned most often is in-store beacons that can broadcast offers and purchase suggestions to shoppers’ smartphones. And every single time I read one of these articles, I get angrier. Because every time, I …
You talkin’ to me? [post 15/100]
Last week I made mention of poor recommendations by way of suggesting that we should maybe stop trying to draw conclusions about everything all the time. This time I want to point out another facet of the problem. I’ve written before about Big Data and the general meaninglessness of that term. Still one of my favourite quotes from 2013 was …
Hunter/gatherers in the 21st century [post 13/100]
Autocorrect failure. Bad recommendations. Offensive ‘related’ content. These are a few of our least favourite things (except in a schadenfreude kind of way). And the frustration we feel comes from the fact that they are all drawing conclusions – the wrong conclusions. It doesn’t help that quite often, we aren’t given adequate means to correct them. A colleague sent me …
You keep using that word: AI and false expectations [post 12/100]
In this wonderful world of technology, we’ve made up lots of words. That’s natural, since we’ve made up lots of new things as well. But sometimes we make up a word and we use it over and over again, even though the word doesn’t really describe the thing that we’re talking about. It reminds me of one of my favourite …