Friday 11th May saw Technophobia staff taking on the true meaning of a first year celebration by reliving our childhoods and embracing some juvenile birthday party fun.

Fun, games and of course plenty of food

It’s a year since our acquisition by Capita plc and the past 12 months have been both rewarding and hard work. To celebrate the occasion we decided to host a birthday party Technophobia style. The party theme was ‘One Year Old’ so children’s party food and decorations were all in evidence as well as nostalgic cartoons clips.

Alongside an extremely well-stocked buffet table, several games added to the theme’s authenticity. One particularly popular activity was 'Pin the Tie On the Colleague', which of course, involved a blindfold and much hilarity.

There were also more food-focussed tasks being completed and .NET developer, Ollie Caine, fought off strong competition by eating a grand total of 26 marshmallows in a minute... using chopsticks. An Xbox tournament, board games and a paper aeroplane launch provided team-based entertainment and were a fantastic contrast of those games we all remembered and enjoyed, mixed with those we can't stop playing now.

Looking forwards...

All in all, far too many E numbers were consumed, but a great time was had and it was a fun way to end the week, and indeed the year since the takeover.

There’s so much more to come than the relatively short time that has passed since last April, and we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds as Technophobia, part of Capita plc.

In his recent post on the localgovernmentmatters.co.uk blog Saul Cozens, Director of Consulting, debates what, in fact, theses responsibilities might include and how they can be fulfilled.

Following on from some of the work I’ve done since the beginning of the year on Trends for 2012, I’ve been looking at the concept of ‘big data’ recently and want to share my thoughts.

Essentially, this is a scene-setter and jumping off point for further questions. It's intended for a management audience, not a technical one, but feedback from any devs and sys guys out there is of course extremely welcome. I am not a data expert, but I am trying to determine how important it is and how it might drive innovation in businesses.

I'm going to talk about the following:

• What is big data, and what does it mean?
• What kinds of uses can the data be put to?
• What challenges and imperatives are organisations facing?.
• What technologies exist to help in this?

What is Big Data?

Essentially, organisations and individuals are now producing more data than conventional database systems are able to effectively deal with. And the more connected we are, the more we use our phones and social media, the more sensors are deployed, the more business processes are automated and monitored, the more data is being generated. It’s increasing exponentially.

IDC, the International Data Corporation, define it thus:

"Big data technologies describe a new generation of technologies and architectures, designed to economically extract value from very large volumes of a wide variety of data, by enabling high velocity capture, discovery, and/or analysis"

That seems like a pretty good definition to me.

Now some technology vendors are saying that big data is no different to existing data warehousing and business information analysis - that it's just a buzz word. The consensus from technology analysts, though, seems to be that we really are now in a new realm - the speed at which information flows into organisations, the number of customer contacts organisations have to deal with, the acceptable interval between receiving information, processing it and producing insight that you can base decisions on, and the amount of data that is available for combination are all an order of magnitude greater than they used to be.

This fact is often referred to as the four Vs - volume, velocity, variety and value (or varients thereof). "Bigger is different", to paraphrase PW Anderson).

That said, the real change is that analysing data of this magnitude has until now only been available to large corporations because it costs so much. Now though, the combination of low-cost but powerful hardware, cloud computing, new open source software tools and advances in processing and storage methods, has made working with big data cheap enough for all organisations to consider doing it.

And they'll need to because the ones that do will get a massive advantage. In a presentation given at the Strata conference in September 2011, McKinsey & Company showed 10-year category growth rate differences between businesses that smartly use their big data and those that do not. And the big data users outperformed their competitors in all categories, in some cases by miles.

Most organisations are probably already engaged in large scale data without necessarily realising it - most are storing data, or having data about them stored by third parties, but are not analysing it yet.

How much data are we talking about here?

A lot. Really, a mindblowing amount.

According to McKinsey, 15 out of 17 industry sectors in the US have more data stored per large company (that's 1000 employees or more) than the library of congress (which had 235 petabytes last time anyone counted).

To clarify, a petabyte is roughly a thousand terabytes or a million gigabytes. Google is now processing roughly a petabyte of data per hour. For comparison, 5 petabytes is the entire throughput of the US postal service each year. 20 petabytes is about the total amount of hard disk storage that was manufactured in 1995. 235 petabytes, a library of congress-worth, is roughly 200 tennis courts completely covered in 32Gb iPhones...

In 2010 total data storage in the US increased by more than 3.5 exabytes, and in Europe it increased by more than 2. An exabyte is a thousand petabytes. It’s hard to conceive of this amount. It’s reckoned that 5 exabytes would be enough to store (as text) everything ever said by human beings since the dawn of language.

To add to the complexity, an awful lot of this data is 'unstructured', which means video, photos, audio, free text conversations, etc. I.e. not stuff that people enter on forms.

What kinds of uses can this stuff be put to?

This is not an exhaustive list, and I have no doubt that there will be impacts of this technology that no one has yet imagined. But the impact will certainly be felt in two main areas: decision-making and innovation.

In terms of decision-making: it has the potential to give people a better overview - by making it easier to find information and by combining data from multiple sources into better dashboards and visualisations, even in real-time. It should encourage a more experimental and analytical approach to decision-making and help organisations become more agile and curious. You can look for natural patterns that show up in the data, and run controlled experiments to test out hypotheses and analyse feedback much more quickly. And it can support human decision making with automated algorithms - think Siri but tailored for your specific business. The hope from some observers (like MIT Sloan) is that this will allow organisations to move away from management by HiPPO - the Highest Paid Person's Opinion...

In terms of innovation: it will enable entirely new business models and applications, for example by identifying smaller groups of people to customise products and experiences for, even down to the individual. Imagine car insurance based on how an individual actually drives rather than an average for the whole 'segment' - the AA announced recently that they are using GPS data to do precisely that.

An important thing to remember is that a huge amount of value gets captured by consumers, not by service providers. And that combining data from different sources can produce a great deal of additional value.

McKinsey have identified applications of big data analysis across all core internal corporate functions - this means that the big data revolution is going to create change pretty much everywhere.

So, what should Organisatins be doing about this?

There is lots of advice out there, but, having reviewed a lot of it, I think these are the most important recommendations:

• Inventory data assets (including external data, public data, data owned by consumers, and data available on the commercial market).
• Identify value opportunities (say by organising innovation workshops to discover and prototype ideas.)
• Gain broad awareness of the regulatory situation around data collection and use.
• Address corporate data policy issues as there are significant privacy and ownership implications. It's important to be aware of what’s legally required *and* what sorts of implicit contracts exist between customers and other stakeholders.
• Develop the ability to deploy the technologies that aggregate and manipulate these kinds of data.
• And finally: start building analytic capability - which is a problem because there's a big shortage of talent in this area:

McKinsey estimate the US shortfall in 'deep analytical talent' - that's people who understand statistics and machine learning - at between 140,000 and 190,000 people by 2018 at current rates of graduation; while the shortfall in managers able to consume big data analyses and experiment with data is estimated at 1.5m people - that's the gap between the number of people in management who will need these capabilities and those being created at current course and speed.

The situation in the UK is presumably similar, although one interesting recent development is that the Open Knowledge Foundation announced recently that they are creating a School of Data in collaboration with Peer2Peer University. This might be worth keeping an eye on.

What technologies are we talking about here?

There's a new technology stack for big data that starts at the bottom with data storage infrastructure at the data centre and network level and rises up via open source database and distribution technologies like Apache's Hadoop distributed file system, Google's MapReduce for data processing, and new "noSQL"-style databases that can handle unstructured content and rapid, distributed retrieval. The stack continues on through data-cleaning and management technologies, then analysis, querying and real-time delivery systems via APIs. And then up into services, visualisations, real-time dashboards and the like.

At the visualisation end there is also the question of whether to use existing visualisation engines, or design and build bespoke solutions closely tailored to the organisation and its users. A combination of both, i.e. commercial analytics packages with bespoke dashboards customised to the context, is probably a good approach.

The ultimate goal, of course, is real insight, delivered to the right person, at the right time, in the right way. There's an argument to be made that telling stories from data, beyond just visualising it, is really at the top of the stack. Kris Hammond, the CTO of Narrative Science (no affiliation) discusses this in a number of posts at his blog "Just to Clarify".

What the technology stack is in any given situation is going to depend on a number of factors - development language, types of data being stored, integration with existing data infrastructure and Business Information systems, availability of project resources, predictions of future scale, etc.

In addition to the stack there are a range of 3rd party services and startups being created to take advantage of this market. Two of the more interesting are Kaggle, which is a data science competition site where organisations can publish data sets and set challenges for analysts to solve; and ClearStory Data which seeks to extract valule from organisations' legacy and web data. (Again, we have no affiliation with either of those companies).

In a Nutshell...

One of the main questions I wanted to investigate was whether or not all the talk around Big Data is warranted - whether it really is a big deal or not. And I think it is, the reason being that it's not just about the 'four Vs' but about new uses of data becoming available to all organisations due to the falling cost of computation and storage.

Currently though, it's still located pretty high up on the Gartner Hype Cycle's peak of inflated expectations. It's going to take time and ingenuity to unlock the potential, and it's not feasible for all organisations to simply become 'data-driven' overnight. However, my recommendation for those organisations who are starting on this journey, and even for those who already have significant business information capabilities but currently ignore much of the unstructured data that is available to them, is to experiment. See what data you've got, what you can get, and get some brains in a room for a few days to see if you can figure out some powerful uses for it. It may not change the way you do business immediately, but change will accumulate over time as you learn through doing...

References:

I haven't referenced every single piece of information in this post, just the most important. Instead, I've created a bookmark stack in Delicious with the most important sources I used. Please ask me if you would like to know more specifically where I got some information from.

Title image: Big Data: water wordscape by Marius B on Flickr.

On the 26th May 2011 new regulations on cookies were issued by the EU, and while the UK’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is not currently enforcing them, plans must be in place to comply with these new rules by the end of May 2012.

Making sense of these new rules is a bit of a quagmire, with the original ICO advice leaning to more explicit methods of gaining user consent, such as pop-ups. However, the Government’s own team within cabinet tasked with transforming Government Digital Services - the GDS, has stated that they will not be using explicit sign-posting methods, such as pop-ups, it seems the ICO’s stance may have abated.

The GDS is citing the disruption and negative user experience caused by pop-ups and similar methods as a reason for not going down that avenue. They’re also justifying analytics as absolutely necessary to continual improvement. That said, the GDS doesn’t outline exactly how it will overcome the analytics conundrum, so all eyes will be on them to see how the issue is navigated.

In the meantime here’s our guide to the new cookie legislation...

Are all cookies affected?

The new rules have a specific blanket exception for any cookie that is “strictly necessary” to carry out the functionality of the website in question. So shopping baskets, checkouts, save and retrieve style functionality are all fine.

What about when passing users to a third-party site?

The “strictly necessary” exception also covers this, as long as the use of any cookie set as part of the process remains an intrinsic part of the activity being undertaken. To be on the safe side agreements ensuring this should form part of any commercial arrangements.

Is there a concrete definition of “strictly necessary”?

Of course not! So while some things are obviously in one camp or the other: Ecommerce functionality is in, (that uncanny ability for Amazon to display exactly what you want before you’ve even searched). Advert tracking is out. There is a grey area a mile wide in the middle that will only be cleared up by precedents being set. But as with most of these situations it is best to err on the side of caution.

What about analytics?

The new legislation covers analytics, so if an analytics package sets cookies there needs to be some pretty explicit signposting of information on what these cookies are and why they are being used.

What is the bad news then?

Change is actively required for any cookie that doesn’t fall into the “strictly necessary” exception. They all need to be evaluated based on what, if any, privacy impact they have. The higher the impact, the greater the effort required to ensure that consent is “meaningful”.

Isn’t this covered by browser settings?

Currently no, the way browsers control cookie permission settings are not obvious and simple enough for the ordinary user to be seen as “giving consent”. Of course even if the browser companies release new versions that make the grade there will still be the old versions out there being non-compliant.

Will I have to update my site?

Some sites will be fine as they are, with informative and well sign-posted pages about privacy and cookies explaining what they are used for, and keeping users informed about how to change their mind and withdraw consent. A nice current example of perceived best practice is gov.uk

Is this just about updating privacy pages then?

Not unless you are making minimal and consent driven use of cookies at the moment. In most other cases you will need to not only improve the information you are giving users about cookies, but make it more prominent on the site and/or provide new consent mechanisms. It has already been made clear that this can’t just be bundled into a set of changes to the site terms and conditions.

What do I need to do/to advise my clients to do now?

• Carry out a review of all cookies set, including those by or for third parties
• Grade the privacy impact of each cookie Review and update the contents of any privacy/cookie policy statements
• Draw up a plan of work which ensures compliance in time for May 2012
• What if I ignore the new legislation? Failure to comply is a business risk and the ICO does seem serious about taking action after the year of grace runs out.

What should I do next?

The GDS has published some useful advice (opens PDF in new window) or get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to discuss this further.

Further information:
Government Digital Service It’s not about cookies, it’s about privacy
eConsultancy, EU cookie law: UK government crumbles?
The ICO Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies.
Dave Evans Group Manager at ICO talks to Pubcon.
 

Last Friday saw a fun and energetic day at Technophobia Towers, as we christened our new abode with its first charity event, raising a great £237.37 for Sports relief...

Lycra at the ready

We were thoroughly impressed (if not a tad disturbed in some cases!) at the huge effort everyone made to donate money by dressing up in their sporting gear of choice- scuba divers, horse riders and fencers to name but a few. We discovered that typing isn’t the easiest of feats whilst wearing goalie gloves, but the outfits set the mood for our sporting day of fun!

Breakfast

It was an early start for the bacon lovers amongst us... luckily Cafe ‘Susan’ was on hand in the kitchen area selling butties at £1 each. The baking pro’s of the office brought in their homemade goodies, which had the break-out area swarming with carb hungry Technophobes, wanting something sweet after their bacon breakfast; there was something for everyone, from rice krispie cakes to lemon and amaretto drizzle, and even gluten-free brownies for the healthier amongst us.  

Lunch Time Workout

After the morning’s pig-out, we thought it only right to gather the troopes in the name of sport, for a mile long fun run, round the quieter streets behind Velocity House. Passersby had the honour (or horror!) of watching the lycra clad group take to the streets and work off the morning’s delicious cakes. Four members of staff from our neighbouring company Capita Symonds even donned full body morph suits and joined us on the run, afterwards helping us finish off the remains of the bake off, and giving a very generous donation.

Once all the runners had returned to hold the fort at Velocity House, our resident snowboarding expert Iain took a bunch of Technophobes over to the Sheffield Ski Village, to spend their lunchtime boarding (or falling over) on the slopes. Best of all, the lovely people at The Ski Village let the guys board for free, so that each of them could donate their £5 into the Sport Relief bucket back at the office!

While the snowboarders and runners did their thing the rest of the team in the office held a Wii dance tournament. Despite our fair share of dad dances, a few members of the team knew how to bust a move!

Question of Sport

We finished the day with a company-wide Question of Sports quiz! We were on cheat-watch in case any of the more competitive types started Googling answers. The questions ranged from venues to who’s who? In the end Account Director, Johnny Rippon's team won with a fantastic score of 33 out of 35, winning a cake for their endeavours. Runners up were Technical Director Rik Barker’s team who fittingly won a bag of Maynards sports mix.

Overall the day was great fun, we were thrilled with the level of involvement, but most importantly we raised much needed cash for those less fortunate than ourselves.

Maddy

Technophobia was pleased to welcome an external speaker through its doors on Friday 24th February. Maddy Malhotra was our guest and was invited to speak to the staff about positive thinking, goal setting and conquering your fears.

Now I like to think of our company as being created by a two-way process; our fantastic people create our culture, and in turn our culture attracts the talented and enthusiastic team that burst through our doors each morning. We pride ourselves on the team spirit we have created here, but there is always room for improvement and it was great to be reminded of the benefits of having a motivated and positive workforce.

Personally I haven’t had much experience of ‘motivational speakers’, so last week I did a bit of research. I am reliably informed that although there are similarities between motivational and inspirational speakers they are not necessarily interchangeable. According to speaker management firm, The Speakers Group, inspirational speakers deliver an "encouraging message which is often based on a story of overcoming great obstacles" and this is certainly what Maddy embodies. Maddy is an inspiration due to his personal triumphs. After a difficult childhood he refused to accept his lot and took positive and quite extreme steps to change the course of his life. During his presentation he spoke from the heart and used his experiences to encourage us to believe in ourselves.

Other topics covered included outlining the keys to success, namely; beliefs, thoughts and emotions, and the importance of adding emotions, values and actions to the well-recognised SMART goal setting techniques in order for them to be successful and sustainable. We also talked about focusing on the positive aspects of situations and choosing when and how to accept criticism and negative comments.

One of the main messages I took away from the talk was the importance of taking control of our own lives. The root causes of procrastination are fear, lack of confidence, self-pity and a plethora of other negative feelings; often the main perpetrators of which are ourselves, so it was certainly a reflective session and a life lesson.

Maddy has been labelled by the BBC as “Britain’s happiest young man”. He loves life, and there seemed to be no better attitude to end the working week with; so with his disposition in mind we all headed off (but sadly not into the proverbial sunset) to start the weekend.

I attended Milamber Digital’s Winter Hackathon over the weekend, along with colleagues from our UX Design team, Mark Goddard and Simon Scott.

The theme of the competition was ‘apps for the games’ and as participants we were tasked with designing and developing a prototype app for tourists visiting the Olympic Games. The categories included; event finders, travel planners and, walks and tours, amongst other ideas, and all had to be completed in under two days.

This is my diary of the weekend

After an overnight stay in Luton on Friday, an early 6am start saw us set off for Camden, London. We arrived at 8.30am in time for the sponsor’s presentations to start.

By 1pm the introduction and presentations were over and we were ready to start spec’ing out our app. Unfortunately at this point we found out that two of the other teams were already building apps similar to our original idea, so we had to start working on something new.

An hour or so later we’d defined our new app, a ‘social compliment’ app with which users can predict the outcome of various events and gain points, depending on the accuracy of their guess work. The game can be played with friends with a points leader board created and medals awarded to the highest scorers. The time was about 4pm and we had some serious catching up to do. Simon and Mark quickly started designing the user journey whilst I worked on Git and App Harbor – our version repository and hosting services. We then started to build the app.

By about 8pm we were collaborating well on the code and had all the basics of the application set up so we decided to head out for something to eat. Our restaurant of choice was Cagney’s, selling dishes such as “The Dirty Rat” and the “Oklahoma Kid”.

A good meal, 8 cans of red bull and a quick motivational talk was all it took for us to get back underway after dinner. We worked solidly for several hours populating the data, integrating Facebook and merging the templates and back end code.

At 2am we were starting to flag so decided to pack up and go back to the hotel for some sleep.

We returned to the hackathon around 9am on Sunday and started work again immediately. The app presentations were at 3pm so we frantically pieced together the remaining parts of the working prototype, prepared a presentation and did a final deploy to App Harbor ready for the demo.

The presentation went well and we were very proud to be awarded first prize in the “Best Commerical Idea” category, particularly considering the high standard of our competition.

Our photographs from the weekend are also available.

Last night the latest version (the beta release) of the new UK government website was released.  We have been watching the progress of this project and the team building it for some time, right from the point where Martha Lane-Fox recommended that all government information and systems should be available through a single domain.  Her report suggested that citizens and business users of government services should not have to know which department, office or agency it comes from. It should be findable from a single, well known and easily accessible place.  The report also made it clear that a single department within the Cabinet Office should be responsible for sorting out the government’s digital presence.  This became GDS: Government Digital Services.

We have already seen on the previous release (alpha.gov.uk) how they moved away from the traditional hierarchical view of government, with layer upon layer of confusing navigation, toward a location aware search oriented view.  The latest version of the new website (www.gov.uk) shows how much they have already sorted out.

So what is new? Well, the search is extremely well refined (https://twitter.com/#!/danblundell/status/164464380468137984/photo/1), there’s lots of reworked and interactive content (e.g. https://www.gov.uk/maternity-benefits), and the design is bright and clear.  But there are subtleties in there that should be noted.  The content has been written to be easily consumed (average reading age of 9).   They have even used a font that (reportedly) is easier to read by people with dyslexia.  This isn’t just for the benefit of people who have reading problems, but it also makes the content easier for anyone, for example, who may be distracted by other things or just in a hurry, to use it.

The site has been built using a technique known as responsive design so that the layout reconfigures itself to cope with whatever screen size you have.  This is incredibly important when you consider how many people now access websites using a smart phone.  In fact the site has been designed for mobile devices first and the additional layouts for desktop computers are added as they are needed by the browser.

The extent to which the team building gov.uk has embraced open-ness makes us wonder whether anyone else in the rest of Government is really aware of what they are doing.  Not only have they released the technical details of their servers, system and tools but they have also released their source code for download by anyone to view, modify and reuse.  They have provided API access to the site so other developers can embed bits in their own sites and have clearly labelled that much of the content is available under the Open Government Licence.

All in all this is a triumph for the gov.uk team.  It sets the right direction for government digital services and puts the UK at the forefront of how this should be done. We congratulate them and look forward to what comes next.

We've welcomed two new members of my Project Management Team this week: Poppy and Paddy.

Poppy and Paddy were adopted by the team just before Christmas and have spent the festive period staying with me, being house trained, ready to come to the new office for the first time.

The project management team contributed to the housing costs; the money raised has gone to prostate cancer research and breast cancer research charities. (hence their colours).

We hope they'll soon become part of the furniture.. ;-)

Welcome to Yorkshire have won gold at the World Travel Awards taking on stiff competition from the likes of Abu Dhabi, Egypt, Brazil, India, South Africa and Spain in the final of the World's Leading Marketing Campaign category.

Congratulations on your win guys, we’re not surprised.

Prediction season is now well underway but I thought I'd try to contribute something a little different this year. Instead of looking at the big trends in technology or social marketing or user behaviour, I thought I'd try to highlight some general themes that are going to be running through many debates in 2012. This is not a comprehensive list, of course, and nor are these themes new - but I think they are particularly pregnant and perhaps ready to burst out of the specialist press and get wider attention.

1. We can all have super-brains

A year ago last month, Amber Case stood up at the TEDxWomen conference and gave a talk entitled "We Are All Cyborgs Now". In it, she explained her work as a 'cyborg anthropologist' - watching how people use new digital tools to enhance themselves and their lives. She noted that "...what we're looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self" - the augmentation of the human brain: it's ability to remember, its ability to learn, and its ability to process information and communicate with other brains over large distances.

She spoke of the teething pains that are accompanying this development: the problem of recovering things we've seen, of the anxiety of message overload and of the lack of space for self reflection. But she also acknowledged that these tools are being adopted in such vast numbers because they satisfy deep human yearnings in us to be better, do more and reach further.

And our augmented abilities are increasing all the time. In obvious ways, like providing us with access to all our notes and files and media no matter where we are (Evernote, iCloud, Dropbox, SkyDrive and a thousand other storage and syncing services), but also in increasingly sophisticated ways of doing basic things like expressing ideas (Jux.com, or ShowMe),  recording information for later use (360Panorama, MeetingPad or Coach's Eye, say), or organising people and resources (do.com, Trello or Meetup). The difficulty now is realising and discovering what capabilities are available, how they can be best employed and then incorporating them into regular use.

But as the awareness and sophistication of these capabilities improves, and solutions begin to emerge that address the teething pains, the portion of our society that is augmented will even further outpace those unable or unwilling to adapt - 'digital inclusion' won't be a simple issue of Internet access anymore, but of capability across many dimension. Ross Dawson in his predictions for 2012 raises the issue of the '10 Speed Economy', by which he means that companies will be at very varied stages of technology adoption, capability and practice. It's not just the 'Ten Speed Economy' that will be a major talking point for next year, but the 'Ten Speed Society'.

2. Just let me focus on what I’m doing

Much of the talk in the worlds of e-commerce and Internet marketing is currently about ‘context’ – by which is meant determining what a consumer is currently doing, and where, and why, and tailoring messages and experiences based on that knowledge. Whether a person is using their mobile on the move, or in a shop; whether they are sitting in front of their TV or in an office all has a bearing on the kind of interaction that is best suited to that individual at that moment.

And so many companies are investing big sums of money into figuring out how to make use of all the data they have about a person, and all the information they can glean from the device that person is currently using, to determine the context.

This is all good – context-aware interactions that make it easier to do things benefit everyone. However the question will be whether brands use that information to interrupt what people are doing.

We think the chances are good that it will; the web has traditionally been a very distracting medium. Ever since the advent of banner advertising and the animated .gif back in the 1990s, advertisers have been trying to take users’ attention away from what they are currently doing, and now with extra friend messaging and push notifications the experience is even more ‘noisy’. Added to which these distractions are now colonising all the screens we use, including our televisions.

This is a very far cry from the desire for ‘calm computing’ envisioned by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at Xerox Parc back in the early days of the web.

And, if writers such as Nicholas Carr are to be believed, there is mounting evidence from neuroscience that this constant distraction may not be at all good for us: that we are training our brains to be distracted. That we may in fact be so used to it, that even the expectation of being interrupted causes our minds to disengage from whatever it is we were doing, leaving us increasingly unable to focus on a task for any significant length of time.

2012 will certainly bring more studies and more insights from neuroscience on the effects of distraction on the brain, and it's going to shine a very strong light on advertising and messaging practices. The truth of the matter, though, is that the problem of online advertising has still not been satisfactorily cracked – perhaps the competition for context will improve matters. Let’s hope so, but as organisations and brands create ‘integrated experiences’ that take customers’ context into account, a major question will be: who will engage customers most successfully and will distraction be included in the measurement of success, or will it be treated as a marginal cost and ignored?

3. Where do you draw the line?

There is likely to be a lot of debate this year around what could be termed, for want of a better word, 'delineation' - drawing the line between what is included in something and what is excluded, and how you distinguish between one thing and another.

Some examples will hopefully help define what I mean:

Should you, say, offer a mobile application that includes all the features that you provide to your users, as your website likely does, or should you provide a range of individual apps for different users, contexts and interactions, and allow them to determine which one they need and install it?

Or: will people tend to use a single social network and use it's internal grouping features to distinguish between different communities, or will they tend to use entirely different services for different groups of people?

Or: is it a good idea for public services to be combined under a single domain, as demonstrated by the UK Government's 'alpha.gov.uk' project, or does it make more sense for individual departments to have their own presences under their own domains?

There are likely to be many more similar situations, and the underlying issue with all of these questions of delineation is: how will the majority of people conceive of these things they're interacting with and how effectively will they be able to either integrate them into their daily routines, or recall and access them at the appropriate times?

The generally preferred architecture on the Internet is for things to be fragmented but made interoperable through open standards, so that they can be combined in lots of different ways for different purposes. This argument will repeat itself over and over again as issues of delineation become relevant to new areas, and it will be good fun to spot them this year...

4. Trust and Anti-Trust

As Wired magazine noted in September 2010, "..one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display." In other words we're increasingly using apps to access the network rather than web browsers, and those apps run on proprietary platforms that force application developers to abide by certain policies, and in some cases a vetting process, before being offered for download.

This trend has been going on for a long time, and Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain very eloquently warned of the implications of it in his book "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" back in 2008.

However, a few things are happening that may possibly make next year a little different: Firstly, the app store model has arrived on desktop operating systems, as the success of Apple’s Mac store has forced Microsoft to follow suit. PC desktops have always been open in the past (at least open in the sense that you could run any software you wanted on them without it needing to be pre-approved by the operating system maker).

Secondly, app stores are proliferating on many more devices from TVs to e-readers and even printers. The model will also be increasingly extended to cover content not just applications.

Aside from the much discussed risks of limiting innovation - especially the 'permission-less' kind that has driven the development of the web and Internet for the last few decades - the wholesale transition to proprietary platforms will have some big consequences next year.

As long as it is difficult to distinguish between 'legitimate' and politically motivated or self-interested bans when applications and content fall foul of the policies, the issue of trust and how it is induced will be central to a great deal of discussion. We may well see some vendors attempting to grab a commercial advantage by adopting a 'radically transparent' strategy and publishing all decision-making, both automated and manual, in full.

In addition, it is easier for the US Government to exert influence over private companies than it is over semi-public institutions like ICANN which have more transparent governance structures. As the geopolitical balance shifts towards a multi-polar world and the US finds itself needing to engage in more complex negotiations to exert its influence, its ability to apply leverage on the global consumption of information will be an increasingly important bargaining chip.

Furthermore, as the landscape becomes dominated by a small number of players each of which having almost total control over their individual app and content ecosystems allowing them to extract a significant tariff from app developers, it is surely only a matter of time before national governments, and the EU, decide to act to preserve competition. Before the year is out there may well be anti-trust cases brought that dwarf the ones leveled at Microsoft a decade ago over their privileging of Internet Explorer.

All of this may finally spark the massive globally-coordinated effort needed to attack the malware and virus problem, which currently provides the platform owners with the best rationale for continued policing of their app environments. You never know...

5. Why can’t this be like that?

This may seem like a completely 'duh' prediction, but I think there's going to be a lot of talk about business models next year. Yes. Duh. However, I think what will be different is that certain successful patterns will emerge that become familiar to the mainstream public, which in turn will give many more people an understanding of what is now possible and allow them to apply it in areas outside the innovation hotbeds of digital retail and commerce.

The kind of model I'm taking about will consist, in the words of Marc Andreessen, of "slicing and dicing different aspects of the economy into vertical slices... and making them available via smart-phones hooked to these really powerful networks with cloud computing on the back-end."

In other words, identifying something that people do or want, and turning it into a service that allows them to do it much better, by connecting it to huge amounts of data and other people, and delivering it through the most appropriate device in the most appropriate way at the point it is needed.

Many of these will be commercial processes like comparing prices or exchanging goods. Some will be data driven, while others will be peer-to-peer. Some will provide a service to the individual, while others will be about co-producing something. And some will be about taking some existing value from one place and deploying it in a completely different one.

My hope is that the boom in such models during 2012 will make people realise just how many areas are ripe for this kind of treatment - there are processes and interactions all around us that are currently neglected, but could be made significant and valuable by adding intelligence and visibility through engaging interfaces. And the big opportunity is for this pattern to be applied in all other walks of life: in local government, in social care, in education, the manufacturing industries, etc., etc...

Once these patterns become clear and obvious to the general public, the radical transformation of all these areas of society can finally get properly underway...

---

As I said at the top, these are just some of the underlying things I will be looking out for this year. There will be many other debates - about regulation, the difference between publishing and conversation, about skills, entrepreneurship, privacy, data, storytelling, objects that tweet, truth, authority, institutions and a whole enormous raft of other topics I haven’t mentioned here, or have even thought about yet.

How exciting! :-)

(image cred: The Purpose of Argument by ImNotQuiteJack)

Here at Technophobia we thought we’d finish the year off with a creative flourish and Friday 16th December saw us take part in the company’s third FedEx day.

Our commitment to innovation

All staff at Technophobia are extremely inventive and as such are put to best use when let off the leash and given a free-rein. So, in keeping with this thinking we host bi-annual FedEx days (an idea that we've shamelessly stolen from Atlassian and their FedEx days.

Collaboration and innovative thinking are at the heart of everything we do here and such creative empowerment very much epitomises our culture. To survive, let alone thrive as a digital agency, we believe we must effectively become an innovation company and FedEx days are one of the initiatives we undertake to help us keep learning together.

So what did we do?

Our mission is to create an environment in which good ideas, large and small, are encouraged, recognised and acted on and our FedEx days really allow staff the opportunity to put forward their ideas.

Several weeks before the day all staff members are given the opportunity to make suggestions for projects. These ideas can be focused around sales and business development, business related, so anything to improve our internal systems, staff-centred projects to enhance our culture here or just about anything people can think of. There is one ground rule, however, we want everyone to have fun. The ideas literally came flooding in with almost 70 suggested in total. This list was then filtered down into the 9 projects that were worked on.

Teams were chosen before the event. FedEx is as much about people and experiences as products or systems and hosting them provides us with an excellent opportunity to ‘mix it up’ a little bit in terms of teams; so staff from different departments and with divergent expertise together created 9 multi-skilled and totally brilliant project teams on the day.

The day itself

Final projects included working on our website as well as developing user experience tools amongst many others things.

The day started at 9am and each team was required to present their recommendations or products back to the whole company at the end of the day.

I was in the group working on an internal communications board. This will be up in the office’s communal area and will act as a staff information point, displaying various streams of useful information such as our internal blogs and events calendars amongst other knowledge feeds.

The vast majority of projects require more time spending on them so will be carried forward  into 2012.

Something to be proud of

One of the projects was to work with a charity called PNI ORG UK (post natal illness) and help design and build a new website for them.

It was fantastic to be able to devote some time to such a worthwhile cause and we hope this website will be both a point of reference and source of support for sufferers for many years to come.

The final design will hopefully be live by the end of January.

What our staff really thought

The staff survey results have already started to be collected up and the day itself received an overwhelmingly positive response. It was enjoyable and some extremely worthwhile outputs were produced, all in all proving what we’d always suspected, people thrive when they pursue their passions and a little experimentation really does go a long way.

Movember is over. The steel city lived up to its name last night as razors were raised to itching faces to put an end to a month’s growth.

The hair-raising effort of the TechMoPhobia team has earned an impressive £2776 to date, in sponsorship, plus an additional £259.32 from beer sales of TechMoPhoBeer and NoMoPhoBeer.  Our warm thanks, for their combined support, go to the fabulous Rutland Arms and Blue Bee brewery.  Movember funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers - prostate and testicular cancer.

If you have a few spare moments and don’t get out much our gallery of male prowess is still available to browse, or just save time and go straight to donate now. :-)

All donations are very gratefully received. Thank you.

Movember’s progress has been great this year with a large proportion of the male population at Technophobia now sporting fully fledged ‘taches. And the inaugural TechMoPhoBeer has been such a huge success pumps have almost run dry with “a generous month’s supply gone in just over two weeks” (Andy, Rutland Arms). The brew also selling out at the Gardeners Rest, The Common Room, Hillsborough Hotel and The Shakespeare. 

Thirty firkins of TechMoPhoBeer were brewed, which equates to in excess of 2000 pints being drunk, contributing over £200 towards the money raised so far this year. For those of you who still want to have a ‘bevvy’ in aid of Movember, BlueBee has kindly rebranded  ‘Lustin for Stout’ a 4.8% stout, now known as NoMoPhobeer, and for the remainder of Movember, 10p from every pint sold will go to the charity. 

For those of you still eager to taste TechMoPhoBeer the Rutland Arms has cannily stockpiled its final barrel of and will be unleashing it for the Movember Charity Quiz at 9pm, Thursday 24th November, proceeds to charity.

Any donations will be gratefully received.

Last night I watched my wife have a conversation with a computer. Not a particularly sophisticated conversation, as conversations go, but it felt like a conversation to her and that's perhaps more important.

She has just received a new phone upgrade - an iPhone4S, and, while she was playing around with it on the sofa next to me, I casually asked her whether she realised the phone was intelligent?

"What do you mean?" she said.

"It has some new software in it called Siri that will listen to you and understand what you're saying. You can use it to do things for you, you know - phone-related things like looking something up or adding things to your calendar and stuff."

She looked at me a bit dubiously.  "Just hold it to your ear and talk to it as if you were on the phone to someone", I said.

"What shall I ask it to do?"

"Um, why not tell it you're going to meet me for lunch tomorrow?"

She lifted the handset to the side of her head, and a soft chime sounded to indicate that Siri was listening.

"What can I help you with?" it said.

She paused for a second or two and then said in her best 'talking to a machine' voice: "Meet Chris for lunch at one o'clock tomorrow."

The voice in her ear started saying something unintelligible to me, and then she shot me a cheeky smile and said "Hmm.." as if she was giving it serious thought, "I meant Chris Dymond".

The voice then said a few more things and her eyes widened. "Er, no, um.. push the meeting to 2 o'clock instead".

The voice carried for a few seconds, then she said "Yes please", and took the phone away from her ear, rapidly unlocked it and flicked to her calendar. There it was. Lunch with me at two o'clock. Just as she'd asked for.

She looked at me in amazement, trying to fathom what had just happened, then said "It didn't sound like Stephen Hawking... at one point it said 'okaay..' slowly, as if it was thinking about something..."

(True story, by the way, if shortened slightly.)

*****

Artificial intelligence has been with us for a while without us really noticing, of course: figuring out what's relevant to us in Google search results, LoveFilm recommendations, personalised radio stations and the like. It's used in smart recognition systems like Shazam and Google Goggles, and in content surfacing systems like Hunch and more recently Trapit, which uses technology from the same DARPA-funded research as that used by Siri.

But I think Siri represents something new - a difference in how visible the intelligence is and in how people perceive it and interact with it.

At the beginning of this year, geeks around the world were amazed by IBM's 'Watson' computer, as it played a televised game of Jeopardy against human champions and beat them handsomely. It was an eye-opening demonstration that machines can now do things cognitively that were formerly the preserve only of humans. I think Siri will open the eyes of non-geeks to the new reality in a similar way.

And so, as I wonder what impact this will have, three things stand out for me initially:

Firstly, people will very soon realise that low-end 'knowledge work' is under significant threat. IBM didn't build Watson to win lots of money at Jeopardy, they built it to provide a cheaper alternative to hiring and training thousands of call-centre staff (amongst a zillion other potential uses, of course, but that one seems the most obvious). What does this mean for our industry? Well, there’s always a lot of work and talk around 'channel-shift' for large customer-service operations - i.e. getting people to use the web instead of phoning up -  and we're going to have to start seriously accounting for the disruption that is going to be caused by this technology. Automated online assistants have been around for ages, of course, but just like Sir Lancelot storming Swamp Castle, you see it coming for ages, then suddenly it arrives...

Secondly, I think it will get easier to convince clients of the importance of exposing their data via Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. Siri works out what you're trying to do by processing truly enormous amounts of data from hundreds of services across the Internet, which it accesses via such APIs, and if you want your information to be part of Siri's answers you need to be able to plug your service in to it (and that goes for any other 'semantic' or 'meaning-finding' system too). This should now be even more of a no-brainer than it was before..

Thirdly, Siri's user interface is highly refined. From detecting when you move the phone to your ear, to the tone of voice, talking speed, pauses and word choice. Soon it may well dynamically modify these things based on the action it's performing, the urgency it detects in the voice of the user and knowledge of how to keep the user engaged. It may not be perfect now, but it's already impressively good. As such voice interfaces become more ubiquitous, and more nuanced, it is going to be very interesting to observe how the support industry develops. It seems likely that software design and development companies such as ours are eventually going to have to understand how to design for these interfaces, and so we’re now at the beginning of a new cycle of learning and process development with all the questions that go with it: What skills do we need? When should we start acquiring them? How much should we invest, and what in?

We’ll be keeping a very close eye on the market to see how specialisms develop and which emerging voices are the most trustworthy. But one thing we’ll also be checking out is where the enthusiasm is. Where are the people who just love this stuff? Are they nearby? Are they in one of our universities? Are they connected to each other? What are they thinking about?

The best way to adapt is to nurture connections, declare your interests and be open-hearted to the opportunities...

*****

The great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - we may still be some way from having machines that cope well with high levels of ambiguity, but, when we look back in a few years time, we may well identify 2011 as the year in which artificial intelligence first started to really feel like intelligence to us.

(Image - 'Touch Here to Discover Artificial Intelligence'  cc courtesty of http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkiepinkie_infinity/3278691567/)