McFilter

January Link Roundup

Another round of dumping collected tabs here... random things but all interesting and worth a read...

• The Rise of the Female Hardware Entrepreneur. This is one of the nice things about the Internet of Things / hardware / wearables / etc. subset of the tech world - lots of women in high profile roles. There's always room for more, naturally, but it's a move in the right direction.
• A good article from Martin Spindler about the Google Nest acquisition. I particularly liked his slide deck at the end of that post, which is more about the Internet of Things in general.
• Value is Created by Doing. Good to remember that doing work is important, not doing things that look a bit like work...
• Websockets (accidentally) blocked by mobile networks, a reminder that vanilla HTTP is often still the best solution to getting your client code to talk to your web service. I might have some experiences with that and server-sent events soon.
• Dude, where's my North Sea oil money. A rather depressing look at how the UK might have fared had the Thatcher government not passed all our oil money onto rich people.
Artisanal Capitalism: The art and craft of business. The Economist looks at the craft/maker movement.
• Dan Hill being his usual insightful self and looking at the Uber taxi app service and what that means for the privatisation of civic services and hand-waving around rules and regulation.

Words Are Important

This year Liverpool is hosting a big business shindig, the International Festival for Business. Today, art and culture blog The Double Negative had an article about it, IFB 2014: What's In It For Me? Part One, which bugged me enough to write this blog post :-)

What annoyed me were the comments from Nick Birkinshaw, who works for local-regeneration-quango Liverpool Vision. When talking of his aspirations for the city, all of his language is about how the city is seen.

He doesn't care whether Liverpool is a vibrant, diverse and distinctive welcoming 21st Century city, just that it is seen to be one.

Initially I wondered if I was being overly sensitive to it, but he uses it on three occasions so either it's an unfortunate crutch word, or the culture he's operating in is more interested in style over substance.

Sadly there are definitely groups within the city who seem to worry all about appearances, rather than execution. It's definitely much easier in the short-term, but it distracts attention from those of us trying to improve the city in the long term.

It's doubly frustrating as the people who should be helping the city's businesses and organisations find out about each other and work together - Liverpool Vision, the council, etc. - end up as a barrier between them as I don't believe any of their pronouncements about the world-class work going on. He who praises everyone, praises no-one.

I don't mean to single out Nick Birkinshaw, he was just unlucky to be the person quoted who demonstrated my point. It's something the NWDA was guilty of, and this isn't the first time for Liverpool Vision either.

We should be focused on delivery, not appearance, lest we fall foul of the old Liverpool phrase and appear all fur coat and no knickers.