Thoughts from Tech Talks 5

This afternoon was the fifth Tech Talks event in Bristol, run by local web hosting company SpiderGroup. These events have an opportunity for networking followed by three 20 minute talks from experts on various aspects of business and technology.

Today's three speakers were Richard Caddick of CXPartners, talking about user experience in design, NetMentor Peter Brill, talking about how content is king, and Steve Allpress of Nvidia and formerly Icera, telling us the story of building a microchip company and selling it.

Fascinating speakers as always, here are some key points I noted down that I thought I'd share.

• Designing for people is hard, and so you need to research and understand people and their behaviours to do it well. Richard mentioned a project for TheTrainLine, where they watched people trying to find the booking references hidden in their email printouts as they collected tickets at a mainline station, leading to the booking reference being moved to the top.
• We all know that content is king, but it can be difficult finding the interesting stories in what we see as mundane. So Peter told us we need to think like a journalist and sniff out the answers to the non-obvious questions. 
• Peter also talked about repurposing content, so look forward to seeing my blog posts re-hashed as forum posts elsewhere!
• Steve told the fascinating (and occasionally technical) story of creating a startup which shook up the world of 3G chip manufacturing by doing everything better, faster and smaller. But the most fascinating thing was the insight into building a company which is dependent on round after round of VC funding - your end purpose is to build something that someone else will eventually want to buy, as they achieved with their sale to Nvidia.

All in all an interesting afternoon, certainly for a biz-tech geek like me. And a great quote from chief Spider James Cook at the end: "A lot of business people don't realise that business is essentially process driven".

Apple's patent victory is bad news for everyone else

Apple's recent victory in their patent dispute with Samsung is bad news for the rest of us. Why? Because it will stifle innovation, as smaller businesses will be less willing to innovate in the space Apple occupies for fear of litigious bullying by the world's most highly valued company. This means less competition and therefore less choice for consumers.

Patents were originally designed to protect inventors from having their inventions copied and used by others. They were not designed to allow already massive companies to consolidate their dominant market position. Apple is not the only culprit - did you know that when you buy an Android device, a few dollars go to Microsoft in patent royalties despite the platform being built on the open source Linux operating system which Microsoft had nothing to do with, and in fact did its best to crush?

Patents, especially in the US, need urgent reform. A first step would be to limit the ability to enforce them to smaller companies. This would encourage small companies to develop new products, while forcing the behemoths to compete by just building better products. The irony of all of this is that Apple does build excellent products that have a massive fan base. They could just compete successfully on that basis, instead of trying to shut out the competition.

When you die, will someone need to know your online passwords?

Here's an interesting, if slightly morbid thought. When you die, what happens to all the 'stuff' you keep in The Cloud, assuming you are a user of such services as Google Docs/Drive, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Picasa etc? Clearly the services will carry on without you, but there's a pretty strong likelihood that your family will have to untangle all sorts of things within your social networks, may want or need access to some of your online assets (what about domain name registrations and the like?), and could possibly want to remove some things from the internet.

How will they do this without passwords? I can imagine a long drawn out process of having to contact every single service provider, supply death certificates and the like.

So there are a couple of ways around this. I could write down all my passwords and put them in a sealed envelope which I give to my lawyer (or some other trusted individual) for safekeeping. But then I can never change my passwords, or if I do I need to open the envelope and write them down again.

Then there is a service called LegacyLocker, who for a one time fee of US$299 (or $29 a year) will store passwords (and anything else you want them to), only releasing them to named beneficiaries on proof of your death.

Another option would be to put all of your passwords in a file which you encrypt using a strong encryption key, and then store the file somewhere publicly accessible online. You could then just put a URL and the encryption key in your sealed envelope, so this is a kind of halfway house.

Food for thought at any rate, especially if you have the plethora of online services and passwords that I have, and take sensible precautions to keep your passwords secret.

Go Easy, Cloud

If you've read my book (come on there must be a few of you out there!), you'll know that I talk a fair bit about some of the myriad of bits of web based open source software that are out there that businesses could use at very low cost. There is CRM software like SugarCRM and vTiger, all sorts of content management systems (not just Joomla/Wordpress/Drupal), eLearning from the likes of Drupal, asset management, project management, issue tracking, internet telephony, the list goes on.

But the problem is that unless you have the skill set to set up and maintain your own web server (and let's face it most people don't), these can be quite hard to get using.

Enter Texas hosting company CloutHost, who tweeted me a couple of weeks ago about their new cloud offering, EasyCloud. Their service is based on a simple principle. They have a bunch (something like 70) of standard templates for a lot of the more popular free and open source web applications. So all you have to do is click a button and it's all set up for you at a pretty competitive fee ($25 a month for a small business option).

So, it looks like a pretty good option if you want some of this functionality without paying hefty management fees, although I do think the average non-techie business person might need a little hand holding to pick a product and do the initial setup.

Cloud Apps for Microbusinesses

I've spoken at a couple of networking meetings recently about how small businesses can use Cloud software to make dramatic improvements in the way they manage their information. My rather stretched analogy is: "The difference between a diamond and a lump of coal is just a matter of arrangement".

The idea is that if you think of your business information like carbon atoms, which arrangement would you prefer? The right software can help you manage your business information better, and Cloud software puts some extremely powerful functionality into the hands of very small businesses. So here's a quick, non-exhaustive introduction to a few tools you might find useful.

But first...

What is The Cloud

Diagrams of computer networks always used a cloud shape to represent the internet. As web and internet based systems started to develop, marketers wanted a good term to describe the new paradigm. So was born a marketing buzzword...

The Cloud is a way of delivering computing where you connect remotely to an online service. In the 70s, computers were massive mainframes, accessed with a 'dumb terminal' which stored nothing and did no processing, it just sent and received data. During the 80s and 90s, things moved towards PCs on the desktop, which run programs and store data. Since the likes of Hotmail launched in the late 90s, move has been back to dumb terminals, i.e. web browsers where all the data is stored remotely.

Benefits of Cloud

• easy to access and use, from anywhere across different devices
• easy to collaborate with remote colleagues
• backup and business continuity built in
• pay for what you use, as you use it, OpEx not CapEx (some services are free)
• data security

Drawbacks

• if you have no internet, you have a problem, although this can be mitigated with backup internet connections (such as a wireless dongle or mobile phone), and with apps which make their data available offline
• be careful with security - consider location of data (especially in regulated industries), who might have access to your data

Examples of Cloud applications for business

The following tools are ones I've either used personally or have been recommended to me. They are particularly suited to 'microbusinesses' and many are available free or at minimal cost.

• IMAP email, which your hosting provider will supply, which allows you to synchronise your email program on your computer or mobile with a server, meaning that messages that you read on your PC also appear as read on your phone
• GMail - the contacts module will sync with mobile devices and your desktop email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, MacMail etc)
• Google Calendar - syncs with mobile devices and desktop email, and you can share calendars with co-workers, associates, family members etc
• Google Docs / Google Drive - great for working collaboratively on documents, spreadsheets and presentations
• Dropbox - file synchronisation between computers and website, allows you to share documents with others quickly and easily
• Microsoft LiveDrive - similar service to Dropbox and Google Drive
• ToodleDo - great web-based to do list with notebook, based on Getting Things Done methodology. Syncs with mobile devices
• EverNote - advanced web/desktop/mobile notebook app
• Feng Office - web based project management and collaboration application
• Xero and AccountsPortal - web based, easy to use accountancy software
• Nuvola CRM - watch this space!
• Skype - great for collaboration but also can be used to provide a business landline phone number

What to do next

• Think about what information you have in your business that is disorganised
• How could you organise that information better?
• What sort of tools would you need to help you do it?
• Check out the above tools and services, some of them will almost certainly help you
• Read my book (which is aimed at business people, not techies) for more information.

Thoughts from TechTalks 4

This week, I went along to the fourth TechTalks event, hosted in Bristol by SpiderGroup, a local cloud solutions company. The event combines business networking with talks on how changes in technology are affecting the way we live and do business, and are well worth going along to even if you aren't technical.

Two of the speakers presented very contrasting views on the impact technology is having on society. Javier Marti (@javiermarti) focused on the ability of technology to allow us to share information anywhere with anyone and to access and analyse massive amounts of data. This, he argued, makes the world a more free and open place - this is also the view of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and one I agree with.

Vipul Patel (@socialspaice) meanwhile concentrated on the demands that technology is placing on the planet's resources. He pointed out that each kilogram of tech product produces 8.5kg of (mostly toxic) waste, that 5 million people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a war over control of valuable minerals essential to the tech industry (not to mention the use of rape as a weapon of war), that we use 35% more resources each year than the planet can actually provide. This is with only half our population having access to the latest gadgets!

Both of these presenters were right, and it was fascinating that none of the questions at the end were directed to Vipul Patel, but mostly to the (also fascinating) talk given on the story of Xero by MD Gary Turner (@garyturner). Is this because the audience didn't want to address the uncomfortable issues Vipul raised?

Certainly, our consumer-driven society has led to technology manufacturers adopting a two year (or less) product lifespan, and we are driven to be constantly upgrading to the latest and best version of everything. Part of the blame must lie with our own behaviour, but when mobile phones begin to break down after 18 months and our providers offer us a free upgrade is it any wonder we don't think about where those raw materials have come from?

Like Javier Marti, I am passionate about the benefits that technology can bring to society. But we need to find a way of bringing about those benefits without increasing harm to the planet, and while using technology as a lever to decrease inequality, not increase it.

Where do we start? Perhaps by forcing manufacturers to design products that last, maybe by requiring 3 or 5 year warranties on tech goods, or preventing mobile phone companies subsidising handset sales. Let's face it, most of us want the latest phone, camera, computer, MP3 player or whatever and with the best will in the world behaviour isn't going to change overnight, so maybe this is where legislation can help.

Anyway, gotta go, need to call my mobile operator about an upgrade...

The ZX Spectrum is 30!

So today, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum turns 30. Apart from making me feel my age, this seems like quite a milestone because I, like many others in the UK software industry, learnt to program by messing around with that little black box.

The machine was designed to keep cost to a minimum, and also to allow people to write their own programs very quickly and simply. When you switched the machine on, you got a flashing cursor which you could instantly use to start writing a program and electrical stores were constantly filled with screens where some spotty kid (like me) had gone and typed in variants of:

10 PRINT "James woz ere"

20 GOTO 10

Computer magazines in the 80s came with programs you could type in (it was only later that they started sticking a cassette to the front so you could bypass the typing), and even if you were just in it for the games you had to type a BASIC command, LOAD "", to get going.

In 2012, we have computers several times more powerful than a Spectrum in each of our credit cards, and our desktop computers have around 100,000 times more memory. It would take about 100 Spectrums just to hold a single 4 minute MP3. And yet, we are completely dependent on stuff other people have built. Gone are the days when the curious kid could open their Christmas present and within 10 minutes be making it say rude things about their siblings in flashing letters. I suspect that for my children and most of their peers, the first computer they actually own will be a cheap Android tablet or an iPod Touch. Fantastic machines of course, but to even begin to program them you need to hook them up to a desktop machine on which you've installed a development environment. Not exactly conducive to casual tinkering is it?

If we want, as a nation, to stay near the forefront of software as it becomes all-pervasive, rather than just consume the stuff as we do with many other things, we need to find a way of inspiring children to program. It's great to see projects such as the Raspberry Pi, and a recognition within government that ICT in schools needs to be about more than learning to use Word and Excel. But as parents, we also need to do our bit.

I've written code since the age of 10 so it's easy for me to get excited about it. As with anything where you create something from nothing, from painting to house-building to cooking to engineering, programming is fantastically rewarding because you are making something which no one has made before. It also requires and encourages you to be both analytical and creative at the same time, things I certainly want to encourage in my own kids.

So, with this in mind, here are a couple of useful links:
Scratch, kids' programming language
Alice, "an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation..."
This book for kids (and adults!) who want to learn to program

It's great to see that my generation who grew up with their Spectrums (yes and the C64, BBC Micro and so on as well) is beginning to realise that in the search for usability we've lost something along the way and is beginning to do something about it.