Welcome

Welcome to my blog.  I’m using this to support my work as a lecturer at Cass Business School, so you should find that the entries refer either to topics that might be of interest to my students (usually connected with managing innovation and technology), or to teaching and learning in higher education.

Apart from this entry, all the entries appear in chronological order with the most recent at the top.  You can use the list of categories, which should appear to the right of the window, to search for entries relevant to particular subjects.

Please feel free to post comments, but note that these are moderated, so they won’t appear until I’ve read them, and I reserve the right not to post a comment without giving a reason.

An example of sustaining technologies

Ironically I read David’s comment on my managment gurus post last week, which mentioned a workers’ cooperative, just as I was waiting for the British middle classes’ favourite workers’ cooperative to deliver a new washing machine.  It’s actually a significant contrast with (say) getting a new laptop: this one replaces an equivalent machine that stopped working once it was 10+ years old and is functionally almost identical; the new one has a couple of extra programmes, one of which is actually useful to me, as it’s a superfast programme, though in practice, like most broadband connections, it isn’t quite as fast as it should be in theory.

But of course there have been significant advances in washing machine technology, most of them to do with using less water and less electricity.  This is an example of sustaining technology – the opposite of disruptive technology – where there can be major innovations but the effect is a steady and gradual improvement in a product.

If only he’d switched his phone off…

… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8360095.stm wouldn’t have happened…

Finding where links come from

WordPress allows blog owners, like myself, to get some idea of how people find the blog: are they following links, or are they using search terms?  I discovered that as of yesterday there’s a link to my previous blog entry, from an experimental BBC site called http://www.shownar.com/ .  This should be hardly surprising, given how much I’ve linked to resources on the BBC website, but perhaps significant is that it’s picked up, not on my link to Andrew Keen’s online musings about the weaknesses of the Internet, but on my passing reference to a children’s science programme.  The point being that Shownar sets out to track online activity that’s promoted by television content

An enemy of the Internet?

Something that comes up repeatedly in getting information from the Internet, is how you judge whether something is authoritative.  But it’s also important to realise that people might be authoritative and influential, but might also be strongly biased towards one view or another.  One example is Andrew Keen, who has created something of a niche as an active contributor to Internet discussions, who at the same time is highly critical of the Internet.  In fact his BBC piece at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/08/developed-by-childish-grownups.shtml comes with a disclaimer that this doesn’t reflect the BBC’s views – as you might expect given the BBC’s commitment to digital content.  I’m conscious that my views on the Internet are going to get much less exposure than Andrew Keen’s (that’s a statement of fact, not of envy or self-deprecation).  But I really find his arguments hard to accept.

He makes a reasonable point (that the Internet hasn’t led to the downfall of the nation state) and observes (as I would agree) that the Internet ‘is simultaneously authoritarian and anti-authoritarian’.  But he extends this to suggest that its effect on society is purely ephemeral, which is far from being the case at the day-to-day level.   Of course the BBC offers a kind of case study in this: 50 years ago they were broadcasting the Woodentops  on one of just two terrestrial TV channels - now my children are into Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab but much more likely to watch it on-line than on television.  Internet shopping, internet booking of travel, much greater transparency of information (it’s a bit anorak-y, but i was able to find my great-grandparents’ family on the 1901 census, then put their address into upmystreet.com and find out about the current demographics of the area, without leaving my computer), using email or instant messaging or whatever in place of phone calls, all have a profound effect on the way that we live.

And the Internet can change the fortunes of nations – I’m thinking particularly of its use in Africa and the potential for wireless services to bring connections to places which have been isolated in the past.  But also, this week marks twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell, and as a thought experiment, it’s interesting to wonder what would have happened had the Internet been available when the Berlin Wall was still standing.

Sifting through the information

An interesting example of putting infomation that already exists on the web has just appeared on the National Rail site that represents the main line train operators in Great Britain: go to http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/ , choose a station name, or the three-letter abbreviation that’s associated with the station in the train companies’ databases, and select ’stations made easy’ from the list that appears.  This will give you a whole lot of information, much of it intended to help you if you need level access through the station, with a plan of the station and photos of some of the facilities.  For example http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/sjp/STP/plan.html gives you a plan of St Pancras, and if you hover the mouse over various points you’ll see photos to help orient yourself, plus very detailed information on access for people with disabilities.  This isn’t limited to major stations or those in London either: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/sjp/BLN/plan.html would have been useful on my trip to Merseyside earlier this year.

If this wasn’t the Internet, it might seem churlish to criticise something that’s obviously taken a lot of effort and is a useful resource.  But in the spirit of the perpetual beta (a term promoted by Tim O’Reilly as part of Web 2.0) I’m going to offer some comments.

First a couple of minor ones.  ‘Left lugguage’ would be an inexcusable typo even if it only appeared on one station – it actually appears in quite a few stations so is presumably part of the template.  The plans are good but the simple, chunky, graphics do have a touch of the web circa 1998 about them, and I think could be made much more attractive with a little tweaking.  Those simple graphics should load quickly – which is good – but I can’t view the entire St Pancras plan on my desktop computer without scrolling.  Therefore I can’t imagine that the plans would look that good on a smartphone, which is a pity because that’s one obvious use for the site: point to one of the photos while you’re using a mobile device at the station, to check that you’re in the right place.

More seriously, it’s a pity that the plans couldn’t be mashed up with the live departure boards, so that you could click over platforms 11 and 12 and get the appropriate entries from http://realtime.nationalrail.co.uk/ldb/sumdep.aspx?T=SPX .  I appreciate that station facilities and accessibility and train running are probably the responsibility of different people in the rail companies, but once all that information is on the web it should be possible to integrate it more effectively than has been done.

But to me the biggest problem is one of wording, and it could possibly be addressed with more guidance on exactly how to interpret the information.  For instance click over Carluccio’s at St Pancras, and you’ll get http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/sjp/STP/objectvalues/3151-0000420.html , telling you that there’s one entrance and no steps into the building.  If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that ‘the building’ referred to the station.  As it’s a recently refurbished major public building, there is level access to most parts of it, including Carluccio’s, using lifts, but the station has multiple entrances, and one way to get to Carluccio’s is up a staircase from Pancras Road.  To be fair, all of this can be inferred from the plan, but it’s not clear from the wording, which actually means that Carluccio’s itself doesn’t include stairs, and has one entrance.  Similarly the description of the gents’ toilet at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/sjp/STP/objectvalues/3151-0000221.html says there are no disabled-accessible toilets or baby change facilities (though it says that there are accessible toilets elsewhere in the station) because there aren’t any in that unit, although both are provided in the corridor next door.  The same effect means that at Finsbury Park Station - a sprawling mixture of Victorian and 1960s construction that definitely wasn’t designed with wheelchair users in mind – http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/sjp/FPK/objectvalues/1872-0000038.html tells you that the AMT coffee kiosk is wheelchair accessible because it’s on a level with the immediately surrounding area.  But this surrounding area is a mezzanine level which you could only reach, either from the street or from the platforms, using enough stairs to make it inaccessible to most wheelchair users.  Nothing on the site says this, although you could deduce it from the plan.  I love maps and plans, but other people have difficulty in using them, and a bit more explanation would help.  It reminds me of the IT developer who conceded that you needed to read his documentation very carefully to understand things, which is great in principle but not always achievable in practice.

Still, it’s a very useful resource, and if by chance anybody from Network Rail is reading this, I hope they’ll take the criticisms in the constructive vein in which they are intended.

A different kind of generational issue

This week the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/11/computing_for_the_elderly_patr.html has been looking at a product aimed specifically at computer users from the generation before the baby boomers.    Its main distinctive features are that it’s Linux based, has a simple interface with large text, and the involvement of Valerie Singleton, who was a children’s TV presenter in the 1960s, and subsequently went on to work on the Money Progamme.   I do think it’s an interesting idea, though I take the point that many retired people are very IT-literate and that this product isn’t for them.

It’s a pity that much of the discussion on the BBC blog page seems to have descended into Windows/Linux rivalry.  Talking of which, the same computer got a bit of coverage at http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-11-11-017-35-NW-BZ - a Linux today site which comes up on my computer with banner advertising for Microsoft…

Tweeting businesses

Sathnam Sanghera has some astute observations at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_sanghera/article6908718.ece about why Twitter works better for individuals than for businesses.  I’m also interested to see somebody at Ford (their head of social media in the USA)among the examples cited of businesses using Twitter effectively – since I’ve sometimes cited the example of the motor industry, which tends to put glossy animated brochures on the web, as an example of a sector being unadventurous in its use of web technology.

A couple more to watch

Mentioned today by the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/11/huddle_soundcloud_competing_in.html .  Incidentally I’d take issue with Rory Cellan Jones’s remarks about Shoreditch and Stuttgart: Shoreditch in particular has enough of the creative hub about it that it has to be the right sort of place for a technological start-up, given that venture capitalists can operate as globally as anybody else.

You could also make a case for adding Stockholm to the list of places where new ideas start.  Sweden’s the home country, not just of IKEA, Volvo, and H & M, but also of Spotify and the Pirate Bay: definitely the place to watch for innovations in the music business

An unexpected critic of smart phones

This comment from a former Motorola engineer at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/6509126/Inventor-of-mobile-phones-says-they-have-become-too-complicated.html .  Though I’d always understood that Hedy Lamarr was the true inventor of the mobile phone

A site being too clever?

I’ve just been browsing http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ ; although I haven’t witnessed it, I know that this presentation format has been used with some success by MBAs at Cass.  The site cleverly includes a Google map and tries to work out where I am, and tells me where I might find Pecha Kucha events near me – a location-based mashup, in fact.  It’s a pity that, while I’m in London, it concludes that I’m ’somewhere near Horsham’