For some time I've struggled to take job titles particularly seriously, but I was keen to refer to myself as something other than "founder" on LinkedIn because it's just a bit naff. In the end, after much thought, I went for the flippancy option and now am entitled Chief <Insert Buzzword du Jour> Officer … Continue reading CDO – this officer is time limited
Category: Technology
In the past few days I've seen news coverage of the Bitcoin phenomenon which has included a man trying to find a hard drive containing millions in the currency, lost on a landfill site in Wales, reports of a rise in theft of bitcoins, and even accusations about Bitcoins being nothing but a fancy … Continue reading Tiptoe through the tulips…
I'm a bit of a geek. I know that. I accept that. I have become resigned to that. I'm nowhere near being the geekiest person I know, but then there are many people who are way less geeky that I know. Here are some things that, as a middleweight geek, I think you should think … Continue reading Five vaguely geeky things you should do in 2014
Continuing a theme from a post I wrote earlier, I have been spending a bit of time today looking through Business Insider's encyclopaedic collection of data about all things digital (see for yourself here: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-digital-2013-2013-11?op=1)There's a lot of data. Much of it summarized into neat graphs. It's all very interesting.But what does it tell us about … Continue reading Trending nowhere
Nearly 17 years ago I was a member of a team that implemented the BBC's first data warehousing project. It gathered information from a number of operational systems, and then using a combination of products provided reports about the profitability of various products that the commercial wing of the organisation produced and sold. Technically … Continue reading Big data, little questions, cognitive biases
I'm currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile. It's not the easiest of reads (a prequel written after a sequel starts on a bad footing - just ask George Lucas) but a fascinating concept - that the opposite of "fragile" isn't "robust" or somesuch (which are just neutral concepts) but rather "antifragile" where things get stronger … Continue reading Digital fragility
Compare and contrast... A new technological innovation is able to make judgements about people's emotional state, and target advertising to them as a result. An estate agency monitors Facebook accounts to target potential new customers in their area when statuses change from "Married" to "Single". A supermarket constructs long waiting lines at checkouts and then … Continue reading Influencing emotions
The BBC has released a new tranche of data about the use of its iPlayer services (full report here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/iplayer/iplayer-performance-oct13.pdf) and whilst the headlines (like this one http://thenextweb.com/uk/2013/12/02/bbc-iplayer-mobile-tablet-use-almost-caught-desktop/) will no doubt focus on the continuing narrative about the death of the PC, there is something far more interesting (not) happening from my perspective. Whilst the consumption … Continue reading The television will not be revolutionized…
My favourite French post-modernist sociologist is, without doubt, Jean Baudrillard. The knowledge that Baudrillard is the only French post-modernist sociologist that I know is immaterial. And yet also material. And statements like that give a little flavour of what you are getting into with post-modernist sociology. I did enjoy reading Baudrillard two decades ago … Continue reading Has everything gone hyperreal?
I love Twitter. I love it for a whole load of reasons. One of the reasons is because it gives you the chance to have conversations spurred by slightly out of context observations from people attending conferences. One of those came up this morning from the Computing IT Leader's Forum - a special event on … Continue reading The end of email? I wish…
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