McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 24th 2014 Edition

• Gove nicked our schools and handed them to his mates I really hope that this gets properly investigated.
• A much better slide deck of rules for life than you'd (probably) get from Mr Gove ;-)
• Worse "In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users."
• The Invasive Valley of Personalisation. A nice term for it.
• Interesting article about how Chipotle cultivates the business culture to help performance. It's all about the people.
• Solve Hard Things Early, another good piece on management structure, etc. In particular this - "Build great habits around communication and decision-making when everyone still knows each other well." - something we've consistently struggled with at DoES Liverpool
• The Overprotected Kid - part of me wonders if we're worrying too much about how kids grow up, or alternatively going through the "in my day..." phase, but an interesting article nonetheless.
• Why Startups Should Train Their People. Expectation-setting, I think that's something I'm not very good at. Possibly because of a mixture of perfectionism and not wanting to tell people things they don't want to hear. Not that the realisation of that makes fixing it any easier...

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 16th 2014 Edition

• A great, if depressing, look at how Silicon Roundabout is slowly being killed by the council and property developers. I should get this printed and circulated to the Liverpool council as a warning, although we've already got the student housing bubble...
• More good startup-activity blogging - Rowan Simpson explains how government funding, accelerators, incubators, etc. are all startup derivatives
• What Your Activity Tracker Sees and Doesn't See - a wonderfully illuminating way to look at how accelerometers, the actual sensor in things like Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, interpret the world.
• The Future of Jobs: The onrushing wave. Long, interesting article from the Economist, looking at whether computers/robots/etc. will replace all our jobs, and whether or not we'll find different jobs to do instead.
• How to Think - grit, curiosity, self-control, optimism and being challenged to step up to the plate; sounds like a good recipe to me.
• Stupid Smart Stuff "Whenever you see something labeled "smart" or "intelligent," be assured that it is actually rather stupid."
• The Good Master. Interesting thoughts on a new old model for apprentices and careers from John Willshire
• I learn from this Tim O'Reilly post that we've been inadvertently practising "Lean Urbanism" for the past couple of years at DoES Liverpool. It just seemed common sense and part of an age-old tradition of reusing old, interesting, perfectly serviceable buildings for new uses that focused on people and activity over polish and superficial appearance. Still, given the continually repeated attempts at regeneration-through-glossy, maybe it does need a new term. If you look beyond the neologism, there are some good points and links in the article. I just need to find the landlords in Liverpool with imagination and willingness to try something different.
• HS2: more people back northern rail improvements than north-south project. Nice to have some (slightly more scientific) research to back up what I was chatting about with a furniture designer in Sheffield the other night - shaving more time off our trips to London will reduce how much work I can get done on the train, better transport links across the UK Maker Belt would be more useful than HS2.

Best City, Best Business Awards, the Missing Links

Last week I attended the Best City, Best Business awards evening, held at Liverpool Central Library. They'd asked me (along with Cllr Nick Small, and Christine Bulmer-Goodwin of Empower Funding) to give a brief talk before the awards, as a local entrepreneur (the second time in as many weeks that I was speaking at the library).

It was an informal talk, with no slides. Rather than talk about what I've done, I related some of my journey back to the city, mixed in with a call to give before you get and to look for ways to help each other rather than just compete. Building a business is a hard job, after all. I also related the story of Silicon Valley's open culture beating Boston's more insular approach, and finished with some pointers to the community and events we have at DoES Liverpool (particularly Liverpool Startup Club.

I fear it was as dis-jointed and scatter-gun as that sounds, but everyone was very polite about it...

Anyway, what was more interesting were the winning businesses. There were two categories: Best Business Start-Up and Best Women’s Start-Up; each with three prizes: second runner-up, runner-up and winner. There are some impressive businesses among them, making a real difference to people's lives. I had a real case of imposter-syndrome by the end of the evening.

The council website has published an article about the awards today, but it fails to link to any of the businesses. In this Internet-age, that's a disappointing oversight, but also in this Internet-age, I can publish things myself, and so wanted to fix that.

Best Business Start-Up

1. Emlyn Jones of Family Court Help
2. Second Skin Events
3. English Rose Vapours

Best Women's Start-Up

1. Kathy Lawrence of The Boudoir Book
2. Impropriety Theatre
3. The Original Cupcake Company (who I can't find online - not the most original name sadly...)

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 10th 2014 Edition

Another dose of interesting things I've encountered of late...

• A local shop for local people. A lovely tale of a locally-sourced veg shop in Glasgow.
• SeeChange - asking all the right questions (which aren't just "get rid of all the cameras!?!") about the proliferation of the amount of streaming video recording that's going on.
• Full NHS hospital records uploaded to Google servers. In case anyone was in any doubt as to why the Government needs to do much better on looking after our NHS data. (The "infinitely worse" story currently might be about mock data, rather than real data. But I might be revising that before I publish this...)
• Civic Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data. We could probably do with something similar for the Internet of Things.
• "Anyone with power has a responsibility to consider how its use affects others." Thoughts about Radical Transparency
• A Day at the ODNI. Quinn Norton writes up the day workshop on identity that she attended at the US intelligence agencies. However, it's a much more interesting read than that makes it sound.
• Great article on the invention of the AeroPress coffee maker. I never realised it was invented by the same guy as the Aerobie.
• The Creep Factor: How to Think About Big Data and Privacy. Worth a read for the term "data redlining", if nothing else.

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 2nd 2014 Edition

Some really good things in this edition (not that they aren't all good, but, you know...):

• Our Comrade the Electron. A fantastic talk from Maciej Ceglowski, including a right on the money rant about how we've built the surveillance state by accident.
• Escape from the 'sink' estate "Either you believe that people who are born into Britain's disaffected underclass are born with criminal proclivities - a belief which I hope you find bigoted and ridiculous - or you accept that the criminal behaviour of the underclass is the direct consequence of environmental factors."
• Google lobbying for unsafe driving - A good point about how, in lobbying for their tech to be allowed when driving, Google should then be held partly responsible for any subsequent accidents caused by that change.
• Another less-than-glowing article about Google, Georgina Voss talking about arts patronage, following the launch of the Google DevArt programme. I know Georgina, some of the artists initially announced with the DevArt programme, and also one of the Google developer advocates who helped pull it together. I think, as ever, there's an element of clumsy manoeuvring from the big corporation rather than any real malice, but the article raises good points.
• Continuing the somewhat anti-corporate-tech slant: a long, but interesting look at the growth of Amazon, particularly from the book-world viewpoint.
• Privacy Icons. It's good to see projects like this which try to help non-techies understand what's happening behind the scenes with the digital services that they use, and give all of us ways to make better decisions about which ones we trust.
• Urban data: From fetish object to social object looks like an interesting one-day conference, organised by the excellent Adam Greenfield. Annoyingly I'm already busy on the 14th, otherwise I'd be heading along.