IPTV Times

The Last Post

2020-09-18T23:52:00.001+00:00

So this is it.

After two decades I am closing down IPTV Times. The last post was Murder on 5th: the last breath of democracy in the US. It will fade in the rear view mirror. Barely anyone will see it go or mourn its passing.

The world of online TV remains a fascinating space, but not one for me. I did my time over thirty years and had successes and failures. As with most people in everything they do, mostly failures.

The blog will remain as a testament and archive to a time and a place and an evolution.

Follow my new adventures at Kwedl Sparks.

There Was No Murder On Fifth Avenue

2020-09-05T00:01:00.001+00:00

The towering blocks make the street seem like a canyon. He smirked as he was driven in the black monster vehicle up the street he knew so well, where he had shuffled property like cards. He owned this town, even if they did not respect him.

“Stop!” He exclaimed and the driver drew to a halt, along with the secret service entourage. He opened the car door and took the blade from his pocket, striding out onto the sidewalk.

He saw the guy in the cheap suit and thought, ‘he will do’.

He strode over in front of him and saw the confused look on his face as he stopped him in his tracks. Then he thrusted. Again, again, again.

The limp body tried to wipe its disgusting blood and spittle on him, so he stood back and admired his handywork, wiping the few splats of blood from his expensive attire.

The body lay groaning and bleeding on Fifth Avenue. He vaguely heard some screams, and his secret service entourage talking into their comms devices.

He leant down and wiped the knife on the suit jacket of his victim and smiled to himself. Job done.

Then he returned to his limo as the secret serviceman closed the door.

“OK, we can get to Bedminster now, I have a round to get in.”

He picked up his private phone and tweeted. “Fake news will accuse me of anything, including any death that happens on Fifth Avenue, including murders by the Deep State! FAKE NEWS!!! “

In Sunnyside, Queens, Emma Blake arranged the flowers before picking up their baby and breast feeding him on the sofa with a wide smile on her face. Her husband would soon be home with a takeaway and they could open that Chablis they had been saving. Life was good.

The Rot

2020-06-18T20:24:00.001+00:00

This was going to be a tweet, where, my dear followers, you will know I post my rantiest rants (with thanks for your indulgence). But I’ve elevated this thought since I’ve started to question how we got here, with an incompetent megalomaniac and his college mates running the country and killing tens of thousands of people and still enjoying 45% approval ratings. This is Mussolini - he was a journalist too.

‪We’ve had some bad ‘uns in British politics, but Nick Clegg must be the biggest chancer ever. He propped up a dreadful Tory regime and is now is in charge of Global Affairs and Communication at Facebook. Let’s get this right. Along with propping up the most disastrous government in British history that broke the country through ‘austerity’ at a time of record low interest rates, when Keynsian investment was the obvious thing to do, then contrived to take us out of Europe (and probably will break up the union as a result).

He was duly kicked out by his electorate, but was surely straight on the phone to those £headhunters£.

Facebook needed someone with a good rolodex, and the headhunters had a field day... I’m sure Cleggie’s eyes rolled like a Vegas fruit machine.

So, now he is in charge of policy at a company that probably has more power than almost any government and he still plays second fiddle to a megalomanic idiot at a salary thirty to fifty times what he earned deputy running the UK. Cameron and Zuckerberg must have been a smooth transition. Supporting fascists all over the world, exploiting ordinary people for massive gain, doing anything to make money. This guy was, apparently, a Liberal. How does he live with himself ?

To paraphrase a Catatonia song, every day I wake up and thank the stars I’m not him.‬ Nasty bastard.

Time For Tech Banks Like Food Banks ?

2020-06-17T18:10:00.001+00:00

Back in 1982 I attended the first lecture of my Educational Broadcasting degree and our lecturer wheeled in a trolley with a Laserdisk 2000 and video camera on it. These were highly exotic beasts back in those days and we oohed and aahed over them.

However, he then reached under the trolley and pulled out a slate and a chalk, proclaiming “this is the best education technology ever invented; it’s cheap, easily available, does not need electricity and can be used by almost all of the world’s schoolchildren.”

That was quite a lesson, and as you can tell, has stayed with me even as I have spent my life trying to innovate ever more complex technical systems (currently largely in education).

But times have changed and in project after project in the UK, in the US, in Asia and in Africa I come across the same problems: children’s access to technology.

There have been plenty of initiatives to try and get second hand technology into the hands of kids - many of them worthy and successful, but none that emulate the success of food banks. Now, of course, you could argue that food banks are an indication of the failure of society to look after our poorest and most deprived and challenged, but it is a reality that works - a practical charitable initiative often run by religious institutions as part of their outreach or by the communities they serve themselves.

So, is it time to take a similar approach with technology ?

Lucky, well off people like my wife and I have a surfeit of devices (and bandwidth). Why can’t we give away some of those devices and share some of our bandwidth ? It would be great to go to our local Tech Bank, watch our devices being wiped or reformatted and then put into a pool and perhaps even be able to then see and track what happens to it (with permissions, of course). Equally, it would be good to set up a public hotspot for locals to use, or, where geography does not allow this, get credits from broadband providers that can be used by those without decent connectivity ?

There are plenty of layers that can be added on top of this once the devices and bandwidth are in place as well as better education - improved healthcare provision, online community engagement, although, of course, the real beneficiaries will be Big Internet who do little or nothing any more to cater for this impoverished market.

The problem is that the gap between the geeks and the needs is great and it’s difficult to see how it can be bridged at scale. Perhaps it’s time for me to follow my North Wales predescednants and get back to a slate mine, or perhaps I can do something about this ?

Risk Management For UK Governments - A Basic Introduction

2020-06-04T22:01:00.001+00:00

The first thing I do when engaging with a new company as advisor, NEX or Chair is to do a basic risk assessment. First of all over the viability of the company’s business model, but then, more fundamentally, over the bad things that could happen to the company. I’m involved with one person companies that have three hundred page security risk documents, let alone what they have to cover GDPR, etc.

If your job is to look after a whole country, your first, second and last concern should be risk management. Not exciting new policies, but putting in place a fundamental framework that secures your people.

It should cover basic areas such as energy security, food security, transport security and health security.

It does not seem that our current bunch of Oxford tosspots, brought up on Grecian and Victorian doctrines by idiots in gowns, ever bothered with this. Why would an Oxford don bother with mere reality ? Indeed, their leading adviser, a Dominic Cummings, had to edit a past post to prove how prescient he was and failed to then do anything about the pandemic. Duh.

The dim wittedness at the heart of government has no parallel, even Halifax and Chamberlain quickly gave way to superior minds and more competent people.

Our government failed to lock down early, failed to monitor at borders, failed to track and trace, failed with the provision of PPE, left care homes as killing grounds, could not even manage their own exposure, followed science when it suited them only and then flouted all the rules they set up. Now they are seeking to compound this.

Will I listen to a word this shower ever says again, ‘no’. Will I engage in track and trace ‘no’, not until it is run by an accountable government. I suspect many fellow Brits feel the same way.

Yesterday we learnt that our Prime Minister is now taking charge as, er.., Prime Minister from the newspaper that pays him a huge bribe.. sorry, salary... which begs the question, who has been running the country for the past three months whilst Boris has been on holiday, writing his book, ill with a disease he promulgated and then on maternity leave ? He’s been seen four or five times during the whole crisis. Three months of pain and no leader.

So, back to risk. Every sensible Brit has now decided that they are a risk manager, since government policy is mere hypocrisy.

Apparently, after three months, we should now wear masks on buses. Very useful.

And Spaniards can holiday in the Lake District but not Brits.

The UK doesn’t have a government, we have a bunch of hungover louts from the Bullingdon Club.

BBC Is The Media M&S

2020-06-02T17:29:00.001+00:00

For decades fashion retailer Marks & Spencer eskewed basic fashion retail trends such as accepting credit cards and advertising. Yet, they were held up as the retail paragon.

Then came major competition in the form of high street chain stores such as Top Man, Next and then H&M, Zara and Primark. The company was forced to change its ways and accepted both credit cards and undertook major ad campaigns.

It goal was to attract a younger, more youthful clientele. But it failed, badly. Young people didn’t want to buy their clothes at the same store as their grandparents. Rather than accept this, the company spent thirty years trying to woo customers who would never use their stores - until they were parents and grandparents.

Fortunately for M&S, someone, at some point, took a decision to add food retailing to their business model and this became an astounding success, saving the company.

Roll onto today and the company has basically accepted that it is an upmarket food retailer and an upage clothes retailer.

The British Broadcasting Corporation faces the same dilemma. When multichannel television became possible with satellite and digital broadcasting, it launched a number of niche stations, including the highbrow BBC4 and the youth orientated BBC3. The cradle to grave strategy seemed sensible in a world of fragmenting markets and solo viewing, where there were screens everywhere.

The problem is, the BBC is competing on too many fronts and getting involved in fights it cannot win.

Returning BBC3 to a scheduled channel, as scheduled channels are about to disappear, is just mad.

There is little doubt that the BBC create compelling content for the under 20s (which, incidentally, appeals to the over 20s, so their view of success may well be highly skewed)

Local media is imploding and the BBC is lowering its commitment to the paltry content it produces such as the brilliant Inside Out (the current season has been canned). In the meantime, it has always sought to retain its monopoly in ‘the Nations’, especially in Wales and operates two channels in Scotland with pretty much no viewership at all. But, to be fair, this is not the point.

The BBC should now exist to plug gaps in journalism and media coverage. Like M&S it should accept that it has niches it is very good at and focus on these, not some ephemeral audience that has gone forever.

We Broke Education In The UK During Coronavirus

2020-05-17T21:56:00.001+00:00

What has been your experience of education during the lockdown ? I’ve been doing daily remote lessons with my six year old niece - the materials from her school were disappointing at best; my nephews are 2, 12 and 14 and the support for the older boys in Wales was worrying to say the least.

The inability of educational institutions to deal or use technology is pathetic. But the range of tools they need to come to terms with is also confusing. I have not found a single decent education platform, so I’m working to develop one.

I should explain that I have a degree in Education Technology, have advised many education foundations, sat on the Course Board of a major university for a decade and currently Chair an E~learning company. As well as being a part time KS1 teacher. Oh, and forget taking a company public on NASDAQ - my biggest achievement was taking an immigrant kid from Angola with learning difficulties and winning the Next Big Thing competition for North London schools entrepreneurship. I really care about this.

Talking to friends and colleagues I’ve heard of everything from pupils being required to wear uniforms and virtually attend lessons for several hours a day to absolutely no support at all. Sometime for children within the same family attending different schools!

One thing is crystal clear - our education system in the UK is a total mess and the institutions responsible for its oversight need to be disbanded and reconstituted. The privatisation of education should have inured the sector, but the reality is that it seems to have made things worse.

I do not know what experience colleagues in other countries have had - I’ve been active in the US, where we set up emergency schools during Hurricane Katrina and am currently working in many, many other countries, but I have little sense of what the front line experience is currently. Please let me know your experience.

My starting point would be to have a CTO for every education establishment - in some cases this would be a technically inclined teacher given the appropriate support and in other cases they would head a large tech department.

The fragmentation of education in the UK with the utterly ridiculous ‘academy’ and ‘free’ schools has resulted in an idealogical raping of learning by the Tories. The existence of religious schools does not help when learning is leveraged for dogmatic purposes.

During lockdown every child should have been given an equivalent learning experience delivered by their teachers, who are still earning their salaries. And the monitoring agencies should have continued with their work. Instead we have the usual dog’s dinner which exemplifies the chaos Boris Johnson calls ‘government’.

Now Is A Good Time To Do Your Startup

2020-05-13T18:59:00.001+00:00

I’ve been guilty of a lot of negative blogging recently, so let’s try and bring in some balance.

It may seem counter productive, but I have built many companies in the face of recessions (actually, not directly, but riding the recovery wave is often a great place to be as a start up - note the two year after a crash gap in my startup history - in 1991, 1997, 2002, 2010).

These can be good times for a number of reasons:

There are a lot of able people available cheaply
Everyone is looking for ideas to take them out of recession and are willing to engage with new ideas and suppliers
Capital tends to be cheap
Investors like investing at the bottom of an economic cycle
There is less competition
There are often incentives and schemes available to help you set up from both corporates and government

Of course, leaving the security of a corporate job may seem foolish at this time, and that’s probably correct. However, that doesn’t stop you from planning. The reality is that the economy and business suffer from a lag.

If you’re laid off then this option obviously becomes more attractive.

But before you take the jump, ask yourself some simple question:

Why am I doing this ?
Do I have the bandwidth ?
Is my big idea wishful thinking ?
Where is my market, how big is it and how do I reach it ?
What resources (people, money, equipment) do I need ?

These seem like utter common sense, but fully three quarters of new businesses fail for one of the above reasons. The best thing to do it a very detailed model and business plan.

What I mean by this is first of all look at your core model, eg I buy bandwidth at 1p, add a service and sell it at 2p.

Then take this model into a BP - my overheads are £5k a month, so I need to sell 50,000 units to break even. Detail your customers in your BP - who is going to buy 50k units from you, how are you going to sell to them, how long will your sales cycle be ?

When I go through this exercise with entrepreneurs six times out of ten it’s clear that there’s no business opportunity, a further three times it’s clear that the opportunity is marginal or lifestyle (or below) and only in one out of ten does a business model shine out.

Even then, obviously, it’s all about execution, execution, execution.

Another crucial question to ask is: are you looking for a lifestyle business to make a living, or to build the next Amazon ? It’s rare that you can achieve both and the approach in terms of investment and development tend to be fundamentally different.

Am I getting negative again ? Ooops... Still, there is nothing more rewarding than walking into your own business when it’s buzzing, or cashing in your buyout cheque or seeing your company’s ticker on a hoarding in Times Square.

So, plan, strap yourself in and 2022 here you come !

Predicting The Future

2020-05-12T21:20:00.001+00:00

If you’re a non exec or Chair of a company your role obviously have fiducial duties - making sure the management are behaving themselves, maximising shareholder returns and thinking through their plans and strategies.

But I firmly believe that there is another key role for Board advisors to play. Looking to the future. The management is, quite rightly, in the here and now. They have a plan and they need to execute and achieve their numbers.

So who is looking at the big picture and thinking about the impact of bad things, good things, opportunities and threats ?

I have always thought of my own key competence as futurology, not entrepreneurship.

In that spirit I have prepared a mind map of the likely outcomes of the current crisis once the economic impact starts to take effect this summer.

I - and anyone looking at this - could probably write a dissertation at the very least on it. Obviously there are parts of some sectors that will be badly hit, eg car sales, whereas car repairs is the flip side of this coin.

So, what use is it ? Well, I tend to draw mind maps to help myself think things through and also to act as a map for discussions with colleagues to see where they agree, disagree and where effort should be spent.

You can do SWOT analyses, but I like to see connections and I also like the idea of traffic lights, or the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the current crisis, this final profile is probably the best to use. It is clear that ‘dot com’ type businesses are, twenty years on, ironically, the winners, whereas traditional businesses will suffer and certain sectors will never, ever be the same again.

I’d love to hear any feedback and alternative views on my very rudimentary and basic analysis.

No World For Old Folk

2020-05-07T21:54:00.001+00:00

My wife’s 93 year old grandmother used to say that the problem with common sense was that it wasn’t very common. She should be running our Government.

We’re in the middle of the most complex and devastating pandemic in a century, accompanied by the worst financial crash in human history, and all kinds of data models are being espoused. The UK government actually show graphs every day and then publicly say they’re wrong. How reassuring.

So, let’s get it straight.

In February, or at least very early March the UK government needed to do three things:

1) Lock down the country and prevent anyone from flying in. Anyone flying in should have been quarantined for two weeks and tested. This began to happen yesterday, three months into the pandemic and is, in my opinion, the reason 30k UK citizens died needlessly. Our PM was too busy writing a book, our nerds were building their stupid models and not using common sense.

2) Ensure the NHS wasn’t over-run. This they achieved. Thank you NHS, please now ask for payback from the guys who would have gutted you or at least sold the lucrative bits to the US healthcare business they have shares in. They owe you big time.

3) Protect care homes. 90% of all deaths have occured in the over 70s and many over 70s live in homes. There should have been an immediate strategy. The government basically did an Auschwitz on this and let tens of thousands just die. Hence our dreadful mortality rates.

A bunch of Oxford Thatcherites, who aspire to Greco-Roman-Victorian British Empire governance strategies, elected by a rabidly racist electorate to ‘get us out of Europe’, did not help.

Exit is simple. Keep anyone over 70 or with an ‘underlying condition’ isolated, especially from kids, and let everyone else get on with their lives. This is no country for old folk. Yes, ironically, those Brexit voters have been taken out in swathes. The young people of Britain have karma.

It’s A Penalty Try For Rugby TV Rights Holders During the Pandemic

2020-05-02T13:30:00.001+00:00

Well, it’s a Saturday and I would, in normal times, be down the pub watching rugby, but that’s a distant dream now.

In looking for the alternatives it has become apparent that there is a massive gap in the market for a sports Netflix.

Let me summarise what is available for me to watch on a rainy Saturday in the UK:

BBC - two Scottish internationals from the last century

ITV - nothing

Channel4 - nothing

Five - nothing

S4C (Welsh language TV) - two Scarlets games and a lockdown show about rugby players

Netflix - nothing

Amazon Prime - decent doc on the All Blacks but no games

BT Sport - a decent set of ‘’extended highlights”

Now TV - I have cut my sports subs since they never had on demand sports

Premier Sports - a good few full length games from the last season

Yes, I could cobble together a sad day’s viewing, but come on... The lack of imagination and enterprise at TV services beggars belief, especially when there is no particular cost or restriction to making content available on on demand services.

I tried to find out if there is a massive rights problem here, but even the lawyer who advises many of the Tv companies and Federations and my colleagues at Rights Tracker were none the wiser.

So, it seems that my rainy Saturday may be buried in a thousand contracts buried in a thousand dusty filing cabinets.

The Problem With Money

2020-04-25T21:02:00.001+00:00

Money already had a problem even before the current emergency.

Money had become valueless. In many countries if you deposited money with a bank you would have to pay them to keep it ‘safe’ for you.

Volatility have long been taken out of most markets thanks to electronic trading, with spreads wafer thin and returns on equities limited to the dividends paid by mature businesses. In the UK this resulted in a property boom that had to be quelled through legislation.

It’s not surprising that cryptocurrencies had become so hyped since it was a ghostly reinvention of actual ‘money’ by anarchists with much greater potential value since it has only confidence as its sole value.

Meanwhile, most government around the world were pursuing monetary policies with public spending being constantly cut back and minimised. Bridges collapsed in Italy, society was collapsing in France and the UK (where Brexit was the price). But one thing was for certain - the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Zero hours contracts, lowering corporate tax, even whilst squeezing the middle class. Yet, somehow the electorate fell for it. The Tories voted for this with a landslide. Oh, sorry, didn’t they ? What ? They actually voted for outright racism and xenophobia ? How did I miss that ?

Now, in the course of two months most of these governments have become command and control Keynsian advocates, to the ‘left’ of any government we have seen in the UK since the late 40s.

And, if money is basically free and limitless, then why not ? Government set interest rates then borrow against it. A million, a billion, a trillion ? Fill yer boots..

Money, after all, is just an abstract concept based on a consensus. How much will you pay for my tulip, cowrie shell Dotcom share or Bitcoin ?

We now live in a world where money has dangerously little currency.

Where do we go from here ?

Rethinking Government

2020-04-24T23:22:00.001+00:00

So it sounds like some government advisers are asking what Britain should look like after the current disaster has passed - and before the next one waves in.

Good, it’s about time. Too much governance is self serving drivel with its feet firmly in two thousand year old ‘civilisations’. Our rulers all learn about the Greeks and the Romans and the Victorians in their public school and then at Oxford and emulate this dogma. The behaviour at PMQs, for instance, is a stain on our democracy.

So, why not start with a clean sheet of paper by asking what government should deliver to its citizens ? What is it here for ?

For me, to be secure, happy and successful are the key objectives (clearly, I think you need to be healthy to enjoy any of the above).

So let’s have a Ministry for each, with Departments for more traditional functions, albeit chopped up and, sometimes, in conflict. No major corporation operates the kind of hierarchy the UK Government does. They have virtual teams, cross department reporting and accountability and project teams. Of course, they manage the here and now, but their main role is to build future success. (The main purpose of our Government seems to be the status quo and having as little effect as possible.)

The Ministry Of Security would obviously cover Defence, Justice and Police, but should also cover parts of Transport, Energy and Commerce - being safe on the roads and not ripped off by monopolies and online scammers would be part of their remit, as would Infrastructure, Energy security and Food security (and even toilet roll and PPE security..). The idea that we need a hundred thousand soldiers in case five million Russians charge across Europe when a minuscule virus took out our whole country shows the idiotic thinking that’s been going on.

The Ministry for Happiness would cover Health, Benefits, Culture & Sport, Race & Gender, Rights, Pensions, National Assets (such as national parks, museums, heritage, fauna, etc..). It would be joined up - essentially your local sports centre would be run by the NHS and could be prescribed. There would be another strong remit around the massive damage social and traditional media are doing to the lives of the average Brit.

The Ministry for Success would cover Education, Treasury, Taxation, Innovation, Business & Commerce, infrastructure Delivery and Work. It would measure success not in the output of the city, but in the average taxable income of Brits and their personal achievements.

There would be a final Department for Governance covering areas such as Policy, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Statistics and Audit. They would also work as arbiters between the other Ministries and Departments (not dissimilar to the current Cabinet Office).

The Cabinet would be made up of four Ministers (perhaps along with their civil servants) plus the PM, similar to a company Board, capable of having real debates and input, not hundreds of noddy ministers eating biscuits and being berated by a PM, as at present (well’ if we had a PM...).

All Departments would be reasonably small and should be based in relevant areas around the country, with small London representation. Departments should then have Delivery Agencies such as Immigration, Police, Prison, HMRC, BBC, Universal Credit, all of which would be individually accountable. Some more lateral thinking should occur here, especially around taxation, transport, energy, business and defence. Happy to detail this for a hefty consultancy fee...

The way Government works needs to be totally overhauled in every way. Frictions between the ruling party and civil servants and an inability to act quickly have been the hallmarks of the present crisis and will probably result in the UK being the second worst affected country on earth even though we’re an island...

There’s a further concept that needs introducing - Simplification. Life is just too complex, from pollution to the tax system, from the need to constantly travel to constantly buy, it’s also time to harness the awakening that has occurred amongst ordinary people.

Obviously taxation needs to change - this was already a mess as tax and rates were fast melting into the profits of US multinationals. But seeing Branson asking for a bail out and Dyson moving to Singapore after every poor Brit paid a massive price for the banking millionaires’ bail out in 2008 should be the last straw. Sure, we need successful businessmen, but more often than not their gain is others’ pain (yes, we’re looking at you, Mr Green). The reaction of footballers earning millions a year is no different.

Reward people for creating security, happiness and success: I would suggest that a nurse saving lives and providing security, success and happiness to all has proven to be far more valuable to society than a banker just doing the same for themselves. Can’t we reward that?

Of course, this will never happen. Things will go back to normal, the serfs will start going out and buying and getting ripped off again, the Tories will imagine they’re back in The good old Victorian Days and the billionaires will wonder how they can be munificent to their better their journey through the eye of a needle as they mop up the debts they have laden on the rest of us. And politicians will continue taking their silver for dodgy books and articles and influence.

In North London, at Belsize Park the nurses will trudge to their shifts at the Royal Free and wonder how they pay for their studio flats in zone 6, watched out of the windows of their limos by hedge fund managers being carried from their ten million pound homes to their eyries in the City.

UK Media Deserves To Go Bust

2020-04-11T18:32:00.001+00:00

We can feel sorry for Boris Johnson as he recovers from this dreadful disease, but let’s not forget that this is largely his fault, more than anyone else. It happened on his watch and the country was catastrophically unprepared after a decade of Tory rule and then the hubris of Brexit.

Having most of the UK media blindly foaning over him did not, and is not, helping. He is an evil, calculating monster responsible for thousands of deaths in the UK through his dreadful complacency.

And he has become a very wealthy man working for some of the most obnoxious, dangerous people in Britain, who are responsible for and benefitting from our misery.

Indeed, journalists in the UK have proven to be utterly pathetic during this emergency.

They keep on knit picking on dates and numbers for tests and PPE and just nod sagely when they are lied to earnestly by increasingly desperate Ministers who long lost the support of their civil servants. But they are beholden to their billionaire or political master almost without exception, unfortunately.

All these Oxford University graduates aren’t helping us now. We need what Lloyd George did for munitions in WW1 not a bunch of privileged rich kids playing politics. Desperation needs desperate people (and that certainly isn’t Sir Kier). There are any number of nurses and clinicians that I’ve seen on TV and would rather have running the country.

But that is the trouble with a country created in the vision of billionaires like Murdoch, the Barclays, Branson and Dyson and totally beholden to the US and its awful corporations.

Every single thing in our country is aimed at making rich corporations richer. Of course, this is also true in most other countries under command economies or ‘democracy’; heck, it is even the imperative of ‘socialism’ in most cases (where the corporations are replaced by the rulers).

The excuses for this are largely around ‘job creation’. Well, we bailed out the bankers in 2008 and now we’re bailing out the job creators. Do these people have an individual economic value greater than a nurse ? Who is more important in the UK now - Rupert Murdoch or an ICU nurse at the Royal Free ?

And what if I asked you the same question a year ago, or two years from now ? Let’s bring in legislation NOW that sorts this out.

And society should have simple answers to rich bastards. Answers which are already applied to poor people who transgress. For example, the playboys who flew in a private jet to the South of France with some young ladies last week should be made to do three hundred hours of community service in a Coronavirus ward without any PPE, not get a slap on the hand and be sent back to their gilded cages.

All footballers should be given the option of paying 90% of their ridiculous salaries to NHS workers or do forty hours a week as porters in Coronavirus wards.

I’m not joking. This is not hyperbole. We need to change things. Regarding this as a blip where the poorest, the immigrants, the good people pay for the greedy is not acceptable any more.

So, let’s see the Euganovs (and their crazy support for conspiracy theories), the Murdochs and the Barclays don their scrubs on and get down to the local hospital instead of spreading hate and death from their castles in the air.

Data Science Is Snake Oil

2020-04-08T21:03:00.001+00:00

If the current crisis has shown anything it is that data sucks.

Actually, data does not suck per se, it’s the data sample that sucks.

We have one of the largest crises in the history of the world. Every government is affected, so every brain on earth is, presumably, aimed at the problems, yet the best the data tells us after several months is ‘whoknows?’.

Those of us in lockdowns get daily reports of weather have no idea we’re waiting for the data..’ from the greatest medical experts of our times. Ostensibly.

Is it a wonder that conspiracy theories catch on and that people start to misbehave ?

And this is a pretty simple scenario. You have the virus or not is the baseline, followed by how ill you are with some additional data such as infection and recovery periods being useful.

The media and academia and business go in and on about AI and big data and data science, but it has proven utterly useless when we needed it most.

The media ask the same dumb questions over and over again (“when will it be over?”).

OK, I’m not dumb and I know that governments are front running public behaviour, but the inability to identify the biggest threat to their economies let alone to plan what to do about it is utterly breathtaking as the predicament we are in proves. Frankly, I consider myself to be a far greater expert because I am not trying to conform to a political imperative.

Worse still is that no government seems to have a viable idea on how they will rescue their ruined economies after this is over (if it ever is). Our governments have all failed, concurrently.

I’m sure they will blame the data.

Nice One EU, Nice One Boris...

2020-04-08T20:47:00.001+00:00

The current amnesia in the UK confounds me. We’re all looking three inches in front of us and not realising that the world has changed forever and forgetting what Boris stood for.

Ironically, the Tories are now a socialist party, distributing wealth willy nilly with no accountability and running up a massive national debt whilst walking into the worst recession the world has ever seen. Thatcher, Cameron and Osborne must be grim faced.

Oh the irony of Brexit now!

But they were also right. The response of the EU has been non existent and every country has acted singularly. The EU is utterly irrelevant. Indeed, unless every German is willing to mortgage themselves to the hilt, Italy, Spain and Greece are already bankrupt and will default.

Of course, some global standard, like Breton Woods, will need to be established that recalibrates and protects the wealth of the ultra rich, as usual.

The US and its virtual companies will rule the world in a way we have never envisaged. All policy and taxes will come from Washington.

There will not be the benevolence of the Marshall Plan under Trump. After his second term, he will build a network of golf courses all over Europe with no opposition.

Meanwhile the NHS is held together by immigrants, from Ireland and the Philippines and Spain and Iran until we kick them out because the Brits have become racist bastards thanks to Boris, Raab and their ilk (like Trump and many racists, from immigrant families): these are people who will do and say anything to achieve power and then do and say anything to maintain it.

Boris was the dark lord of this hell, wanting to expel all foreigners (despite being one himself) and I’m pretty convinced that his life is currently being saved by EU nationals. Oh, the irony...

Aren’t we better than this ?

Educationally Challenged, I Need To Invent

2020-04-01T19:52:00.001+00:00

I’m spending my time doing two things at the moment - acting as interim CTO for ELS, a learn from experience company, and providing some home schooling remotely for Millie, my 5 year old niece.

I should add, that as well as a career building online video and media management companies all over the world, I have a degree in Education and have been actively involved in the sector, sitting on a Course Board for City University for nearly a decade, for example.

So, I like to think that I know something about education and technology.

Which is why the past three weeks has been a shock. To deliver my lessons to Millie I’ve ended up using a combination of Office and Skype. Literally, old school. Meantime my nephews up in Wales are having their high school lessons delivered by un-interactive PDFs that they have to print out by the tens of pages. WTF ?

I’ve tried perhaps a hundred and twenty different packages and platforms, from Google Education to Anewspring, from Zoom to Hangouts, without finding a decent product for teaching one to one.

I work with some brilliant academics and educators and they have all suggested packages, but they are either too simple or too complex or lacking features (especially video IM), or are aimed at organisations not individuals.

At this stage it might be worth detailing what I’ve been doing with the team at ELS for the past year. They had a platform that was built for delivering apps to a wide range of platforms, especially VR apps, which they specialise in.

We’ve expended this to cover the creation, deployment, management and reporting of apps across any platform, from a web browser to a VR headset, taking in Android and iOS apps on the way.

It’s a hugely sophisticated platform and most recently we’ve been adding some really innovative concepts around measuring educational objectives and outcomes using SCORM/XAPI (define a verb undertaken by an actor to an object with an outcome) and creating content - an App can be made up of a module with Activities. Activities can be of any type, eg question and answer, multiple choice questionnaire, interaction with a bot, real world exercise, branching interaction, word cloud, picture cloud, video, text, image, live seminar. So, they can be combined into either a fixed or dynamic delivery, with detailed built in metrics, because I have a real bee in my bonnet about how education is measured that has come into sharp focus now that we’re going to have a year of students who will not sit exams (a dreadful concept at the best of times, even though I was one of the lucky ones who was rather good at them).

A major problem with education in any context is that very little aptitude testing happens on the way in, so you find a lot of people doing things they’re really not very good at.

Our platform can be used for this, and VR is a brilliant way of assessing this since you can add factors such as psychometric and physical measurements.

So, it now looks like necessity is the mother of invention and that I need to combine my knowledge of video and education to build a platform to deliver lessons to my niece.

It all goes to prove that times of adversity bring invention.

How To Run A Virtual Company

2020-03-10T22:35:00.001+00:00

For the last fifteen years I have worked virtually with clients and teams all over the world. Even before then, I ran a company listed on NASDAQ without a desk or office (my current office can be seen above).

So, in light of the current drive to home working, I hope that some benefits of my experience might be useful.

Structure - becomes even more important when your team or company is virtualised. In small companies there often is no structure so mini teams need to be created. In larger organisations there tend to be hierarchies plus project groupings. Translating and transferring these online and instigating the right tools and communications protocols is the main challenge.

Tools - talking of which... a large company will have formal systems that you should be able to access from home. Other companies will need to standardise on their tools: Asset management (eg the F drive or Dropbox), Task Management, eg Wunderlist or Trello, collaborative software, eg Teams or Slack, Comms, eg Zoom or Skype. And email still rules the roost.

Process - look to replace physical working practices with virtual ones. Hold a ‘scrum’ or call at the beginning of every day to discuss the TV from the day before and anything else you might discuss when physically together.

Evaluation - working physically or virtually are just states of mind: what counts are the outputs. This is your opportunity to look at your business more carefully and to break down corporate objectives into team and then individual objectives.

Deliver Platform 2 becomes: Update UX, Add SSO, Improve Functionality and each of those can be further broken down into tasks for the dev team. Equally, £1m of sales can be broken down into sales channels and targets for each.

In fact, the great thing about creating a virtualised organisation is that it forces CEOs and managers to carefully analyse their contribution to a business’ goals and then plan carefully and introduce accountable metrics. By definition, your business needs more structure.

Then, who cares if Simon from Sales is spending two days a week playing golf if he’s smashing his sales figures and has a pipeline to match ?

Indeed, remote working is an opportunity to re-invent and re-think an organisation, potentially with great advantages.

What GDPR Should Have Done

2020-03-02T23:28:00.001+00:00

GDPR is probably the most stupid legislation ever enacted and I hope that U.K. will now drop it so that we don’t see a pop up every time we visit a website.

Its intent, however, was good. We should enact similar legislation that transfers the data of individuals to them.

If Google want to know my game, measure my use of their websites or track me on other websites they should get my permission. Fuck cookies. I should be able to ask Google to pay me for my data.

The EU legislation is just awful since it hits small business and has no impact on Big Internet. Ot does not empower individuals, it just creates opportunities for the hugely corrupt EU to raise money that will go to some corrupt corner of their institution.

Let’s change this. If Google want my data they have to bid for it. That’s their model. So let’s play it.

The U.K. government could do it in a blink, why don’t they?

To Infinity And Beyond

2020-03-01T20:22:00.001+00:00

A lawyer and a musician in the US have written an algorithm to sequence all possible 8 note 12 beat melody and save them as MIDI files so as to render them uncopyrightable.

It’s hardly surprising that, after nearly 70 years of ‘popular’ music everything that can be written using seven musical notes (OK there are variations and other scales than the chromatic..) has been written.

Creativity is potentially infinite, but as the old adage about monkeys, typewriters and the complete works of Shakespeare states, anything is possible.

What Artificial Intelligence (or even less complex computational algorithms) does is make the infinite finite, especially by discounting less useful options (eg discordant melodies).

There is also complexity around the concept of authorship or invention. Who owns something that an algorithm comes up with ? The owner of the algorithm ?

As more and more high quality TV is produced, the industry faces a similar challenge over formats and other IP within productions.

Indeed, it is possible to get metaphysical about the issue and question if creativity exists if bots are able to be more ‘creative’ than humans.

Rhiannon

2020-02-27T01:06:00.001+00:00

One of the greatest frustrations of the Internet is that anything before 2000 or so is missing.

So, it’s fantastic that one of my most favourite albums of all time (from 1980) has finally gone online.

Rhiannon Tomos is to Welsh music what Steve Nicks and Janis Joplin were to American music and I not only grew up listening to her seminal album, but had the honour of backing her band in many gigs. Her music was up there with all the US and UK greats when I was learning and playing music.

Unfortunately, two of her best songs, Cwm Hiraeth and Gormod i’w Golli are not on the album, and I hope they can be added soon.

The songs were written with two guitarists, one melodic and the other a rocker, so the album has variety.

Listen. Enjoy!

Chord Cutting Guide

2020-02-25T19:24:00.001+00:00

Having suffered at the sharp end of the chord cutting revolution, I thought that it might be interesting to put together a matrix to help others benefit from my trials and tribulations, so here goes (apologies if it breaks the formatting of your browser):

I've put this together based on devices and services I use in the UK. Please let me know if I have got anything wrong and I will update it, or if I should add services or devices to the matrix.

For the record, I would always favour Roku, but am totally frustrated that the major sports services can't be bothered to develop an app for it and will continue to lobby BT Sport and Premier Sport until they see some sense...

The New Jewel In The Crown

2020-02-04T21:39:00.001+00:00

It seems that YouTube is getting close to capturing $1 in $10 global TV advertising revenues as Alphabet yesterday broke out its ad sales for the video service for the first time. (The global TV ad market is estimated at $180m pa, YT took $15m).

For most broadcasters the major cost of attracting advertising dollars is producing content, but for YouTube, who invest paltry amounts in original content, the cost is against technology.

The cost of ingesting, hosting and serving 500 new hours of content per minute is considerable (for the record I’d put the cost at around $500m pa for the tech alone if sunk costs are factored in), but the margins are still tremendously better than the content production model.

I reckon that YouTube is on course to make three times the gross profit of services like Netflix, albeit offering a very different service.

And as subscription and streaming services eschew advertising, the value of YouTube ad slots actually go up: there is an incressing paucity of places for TV ad dollars to go.

Clegg The Clot

2020-01-24T12:41:00.001+00:00

You may hate Trump and dislike Boris, but they’re simply clever chancers who made good.

Next to the obnoxious hypocrite that is Nick Clegg they are saints. Not only did he back tuition fees after promising he wouldn’t, he led his political party into total oblivion and then compounded this with an unbelievable move to Facebook, where he now touts some of the most dangerous ideas modern society has ever seen.

He even argues against paying equitable taxation (no doubt he thinks students should make up the difference..), utterly betraying his own country.

Naturally, he is able to live with himself since he gets paid a massive salary for this. The man’s chutzpah knows no bounds.

I wonder what that greatest of chancers, Lloyd George, would have made of him. Not a lot, I suspect.

Go Green, Drop The Internet

2020-01-24T10:46:00.002+00:00

I have kept my car for thirteen years, my fridge for ten, my central heating system is fifteen years old and in my second home I have a perfectly good cooker and oven from the 1980s.

However, Sonos this week told me that my four year old speakers are obsolete, and my Nest devices of a similar age are barely supported.

This is the problem with IOT - it operates on the timescale of computers, which have a lifecycle of three to five years, not ten to twenty five years of traditional appliances.

Not only is this expensive, but it is hugely wasteful and not very green.

As a result I have decided that I will no longer buy any IOT devices unless they are capable of operating without the internet.

It is not only this aspect of the internet that is very bad for the environment - Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of power for its stupid, useless, unproductive ‘mining’ operations, whilst streaming video uses many tens of thousands times more power than traditional broadcasting.

Of course, the internet also preserves energy - many meetings can happen online that would have demanded travel and the use of paper and printing has reduced tremendously.

The real problem is that internet business models have been developed not only with disregard for morality, financial and social models, but also for the environment. It is time for reflection and regulation.