In the way that only social networks allow, I got into a brief conversation this morning with Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and the person spearheading digital initiatives in the EU, and Martha Lane-Fox the digital entrepreneur. On Saturday it's International Women's Day, and Neelie tweeted: https://twitter.com/NeelieKroesEU/status/441501736147378176 My response was that, whilst … Continue reading Gender imbalance
Category: Hobby horses
News came out yesterday that the Visify service has been acquired by Yahoo!, and as a result is to be "sunsetted". By that, they mean turned off, shut down or stopped - take your pick. A dreadful metaphor, a software equivalent to "downsized", "right-sized" or "let go". Let's be honest, a sunset is something that … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 10 Sunsetting
Insurance is an interesting game. Essentially it's an activity of risk management: attempting to find things of concern to a large number of people that are relatively improbable. The gap between the insurance premiums and the payouts is the profit margin, and at the core of the whole proposition is the unknown risk. As a … Continue reading Reducing risk
There are times when I reckon I just don't get it. The world out there is different to the way I think, and I've got some sort of gap in my cognitive abilities. Last night's news about the WhatsApp purchase by Facebook (for anything up to a report $19Bn) was one of the those times, … Continue reading Bloody hockey sticks
The recent Year of Code debacle has had me looking back at the work of the first great coding educationalist, Seymour Papert. If you're not aware of Papert's work, but you are of a certain age, you may have come across his programming language invention Logo - a syntax to control the actions of … Continue reading Purple turtles
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to learn to code. It wasn't a "right" - I was just lucky to be in a home where there was a computer (a BBC Micro that my dad had supplied by his work). In those days in the mid-Eighties, coding was pretty much synonymous … Continue reading A fuller appreciation
Two themes in my Twitter stream today that have been fused together in my mind. 1) the government's Universal Credit benefits reform, turning into a great beast of a disaster. At it's core (from where I see it) "IT disasters" resulting from ineffective change management, an over-confidence that technology in its own right can deliver … Continue reading Would learning to code help?
https://twitter.com/furtherfield/status/431407949672480768 In my lifetime I've known three meanings of the word "hack": to go at something with a sharp implement; to (criminally) break into computing resources that you shouldn't; and to botch a bit of programming to get it working, or just to see whether something might do. None of those definitions are particularly positive. … Continue reading Hacked off
The term dashboard has irritated me for a long while. I'm of the school of thought that if you try to make complex things really simple, you've probably made them stupid too. Complexity and ambiguity is the way of the world in which we live, and boiling down multi-faceted management information into a couple … Continue reading Crap tech industry metaphors: 9 the dashboard
My wife recently entered the world of the quantified self and wearable computing when she got a FitBit activity tracker. It's really interesting to see how quickly the device, the app, and the "10,000 steps a day" target has changed her behaviour. We are walking to places where before we would have driven. I'm … Continue reading The only person you’re cheating is yourself
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