Google do a lot of good things. They host free webfonts to make the web a nicer place to be. Their cloudy PaaS service, Engine Yard, gets rave reviews. Their maps are better than anyone’s, their mobile OS is the most popular in the world, and their photo hosting offer is second to none. But they…
Companies
Things I learned at my last job
Today I closed a chapter in my life. After nearly 4 years tenure at a company I wanted to reflect on the things I learned over that time. I have been very lucky to have a few excellent – world-class even – mentors here who have taught me things that will stay with me for the…
The Sharing Economy
The ‘Sharing Economy’ is disrupting established industries and sending huge, powerful incumbents into a tizzy. Uber and AirBnB have shaken the taxi and hotel sectors, shifting power, control and profits from the RadioCabs and Hiltons of this world and into the hands of ordinary citizens armed with nothing more than a smartphone and a mobile data…
Bad Company: Plusnet
“Hello, Mr. Stokoe, I’m afraid I have an apology to make – we spoke on Tuesday night but I forgot to save the comments onto your account, can you remind me what we were discussing?” said Mike from painfully incompetent ISP, Plusnet, a subsidiary of BT. 18 Months Earlier… The adverts were full of it,…
Google’s Project Loon
Google are doing a lot of “10X innovation” right now. That is innovation that isn’t just incrementally better than the competition (like a 10% improvement) but a moon-shot, 10-times improvement. One of these initiatives is called Project Loon: You can sometimes see these balloons being tested off the coast of Christchurch, New Zealand, on FlightRadar,…
Swatch Internet Time on Your Desktop
I’ve spoken before about Swatch Internet Time as an option for solving the horrible problems of cross-timezone collaboration. But nobody is adopting it. There are good reasons for this: it’s not overly difficult to work out timezone differences, there are more intuitive alternatives such as using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and ultimately nobody is betting…
One Man and his Hyperloop
OK. You’ve got billions in the bank, a head for phenomenally-successful disruptive engineering, a great business record and a clean sheet of paper. How would you revolutionise transportation? Elon Musk is that man and, tonight, he tweeted that all will be revealed by 12th August. His idea? The Hyperloop. Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by…
A Quick Rant about Capri Sun
I couldn’t help noticing how close Capri Sun is to trending on Twitter and I had to say something: Capri Suns are a sadistic experiment to see how much shit consumers will put up with. Fact. YOU HAD ONE JOB! Things that are wrong with Capri Sun: It’s a non-rigid liquid container. Doesn’t that…