Category: design-and-ideas

You limit your imagination by what you know

Elon Musk

I’ve been catching up on my instapaper and liking the interview with Elon Musk by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson compares and singles out Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as serial disrupter’s.

It is no surprise, then, that Musk has often been referred to of late as “the next Steve Jobs.” The comparison I want to make between them, however, is not just in the diversity and scale of their achievements. It’s also in their thought processes. I see in them a mental trait that is incredibly rare, a trait that has made me a huge admirer of both men, and of their creations.

So what is their unique brand of genius? Here’s how I think of it: system-level design thinking powered by extraordinary conviction. Each of those italicized phrases is critical.

I like what Chris picks out in them both. Although not a fan of Steve Jobs choices and direction later with media and computing. I do respect his brilliance of thought. Elon is frankly the tony stark of the real world. I can’t say enough about his achievements and I’m sure many more are to come.

I love the way he thinks… as he gets going in this paragraph about the spaceX.

“What I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day,” he said. “But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive.” Reasoning by analogy would be someone in 1900 thinking that the way to get faster transport was to breed stronger horses. You limit your imagination to a simple extension of what you already know. That is not how the world changes.

What is there not to love? Its a good interview and full of good observations.

Well here’s some passing words to think about…

Dream big! Don’t focus on making money! Work for an idea that’s bigger than you are! Broaden your mind! Embrace thinking from outside disciplines! Expose yourself to the world’s most inspiring designs and designers! Make things as simple as they can be (and no simpler)! Immerse yourself in science and leading-edge technologies! Don’t be limited by what’s gone before! Play with radical outside-the-box future possibilities and keep playing until you find something really big that you believe in!

TedxSalford biggest in the UK, don’t you know?

TEDxSalford

A few Sundays ago (10th November 2013), I had the somewhat pleasure of going to TedxSalford.

I say somewhat because although I enjoyed most of the talks, I felt strange about it. Specially after doing the first TedXManchester at the old BBC in Oxford Road. And then speaking at the second one in the cornerhouse.

The whole event is slick and a well polished affair. And thats my problem with it.

TedxSalford as someone said on stage, is bigger than most Ted Conferences! According to wikipedia the Lowry theatre holds 1730.  There were a lot of people maybe at a push 1400  as the lowry theatre wasn’t quite full but the ground floor and circle were packed solid. I got a seat in the private boxes which was lovely. Cheers iMartyn, Simon and Shane.

How did it get so big? I assume its the support from the University of Salford which helps make it possible. Thats not to take anything away from the staff and people involved in the whole operation. But I’m use to Tedx’s showcasing new and local talent rather than collectively getting people flown in from across the world. And with a line up including astronauts again its easy to see why its so popular.

TEDxSalford

Ok hands up I’m bias because having run the first TedxManchester1 with Herb Kim in the BBC Oxford Road, I do feel like we tried to do a number of things including highlight local talent and local concerns. TedxManchester2 was the same, but of course I would say that having the chance to tell my story on stage. I can’t imagine TedxSalford would let me anywhere near the stage. Yes they had a Manchester Utd player but to be fair he was pretty good for being nervous. You can’t help but feel they over stepped the local by having an international foodball player.

Please don’t get me wrong, its nice both TedxManchester and TedxSalford have each found there niche and they don’t overlap. I just think I prefer TedxManchester personally. There is something about genuine and authenticity which seems to be missing. I felt like we went from here’s a massive speaker to here’s another big speaker to yes you guessed it another massive speaker. Thinking Digital has big speakers but Herb balances them with themes to make proceedings a lot less choppy. I’d also look at what Imran does with TedxLeeds and TedxBradford. Well thought out lineup, with a narrative running from one to the other.

Saying all that… The whole event was very well produced except the sheer amount of people made getting lunch and the break out sessions a total nightmare. There were some fantastic speakers…the one which got me was once again Graham Hughes who talked about being the only man to travel to travel into every county by land only.

Other noticeable talks came from Lucy Siegle who talked about the fashion and the incredible waste it generates (one for my sister). Google Glass technical lead Thad Sturner for a great break out session i was able to squeeze into. Poet Lemn Sissay for some great slam poetry on stage. George Smooh for making my brain overload a little. Hetain Patel for his amazing art work and art direction.

Something I mentioned a lot in previous blog posts. Recorded from TedxSanjoseca, Steve Mazan’s look at life and death. Not to be missed…

So as a whole TedxSalford is well worth going to if you want the TED experience (I assume it might be like that, although I’ve never actually been). Just don’t expect anything local like the other regional tedx’s. That can be a good and bad thing depending on what you want or expect. This is a case of bigger isn’t always better…

300seconds at the BBC Media City

Becky, Rosie, Jasmine - The R&D girls

It wasn’t Ted and it wasn’t TedXSalford (still need to write up my thoughts on that conference). It was something new and fresh… 300seconds I wrote about a while ago announcing its first regional (outside of London) event at Media City UK. New fresh and something which would actually help the people giving the presentation as well as inspire the audience.

The line up for the event was great balance of talks by women who all had different levels of talking experience. They all had reasons why they wanted to give it a try and frankly all did a fantastic job! Nerves and all!

Kylie Hodges, Bliss, The World of Social Media, Premature Babies and International Engagment
Jasmine Cox, BBC, Maker of Things
Ciara McVeigh, Discerning Digital, You Don’t Have to be a Geek to Work in Tech

300Seconds at BBC North

Victoria Sorzano, BBC, Confessions of a Digital Witch: Finding your Niche
Amy Lynch, ThoughtWorks, The underrepresentation of women in tech conferences
Rebecca Gregory-Clarke, BBC, How to Build a Weather Robot

Rosie Campbell, BBC, Using Game Theory to survive in a hungry tribe
Catherine Jones, Science Museum, Turning a 1920′s radio into a 21st Century Exhibit

The videos for the talks will be up on the 300seconds you tube channel in the near future.

Robin and Amy Lynch

I wanted to say thank you to BBC R&D who supported the project along with BBC North. Louise Blythe for her lovely hands off coaching and great 3 useful points for communicating an idea to someone. Robin Cramp who has seriously become a superstar MC for conferences, he’s so funny and so entertaining I think he may deserve his own show. His wheel of feedback was simply hysterical.

Fantastic night and I’m happy to say we’re already in talks about doing another in 2014, so look out for your chance to sign up and put yourself forward to talk for 300seconds.

Memetic Ripples

Wispers

I recently did a 1min talk (well it turned into 90secs, but I wasn’t counting) on Memetics and a quick snap shot of what it is in theory. I didn’t do the best of jobs in the short while I had but its something I’m really interested in…

In the short… from wikipedia

Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins‘ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.

The meme, analogous to a gene, was conceived as a “unit of culture” (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is “hosted” in one or more individual minds, and which can reproduce itself, thereby jumping from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen—when adopting the intentional stance—as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme’s success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.

Its a general theory and honestly a really interesting one to think about when thinking about influence, the attention economy, globalisation and our global network. Also really fun to think and understand the  perfect conditions. Who makes for a good host, who holds back the meme spread and why? Is there a link between openess and sharing of memes/ideas/thoughts?

I have Dave, Miles and a few others for putting a name to the thing I was always fascinated with. Sarah studied disease outbreaks for the health protection agency (HPA) and remember the errly similar process of counting numbers as they grow massive very quickly. Network effects slightly excites and marvel me… Maybe a job in advertising awaits?

Anyway, I like systems and things which foster sharing. This is why I like Schemier and as I only recently discovered Google ripples. This I must have missed somewhere on my travels.

Fascinating how certain ideas spread eh?

Maybe you too, might be interested in Memetic theory?

Lesser known Google projects

Google unveils uProxy for Chrome, Firefox to help protect ‘free speech’- @757LiveTech

There seems to be a number of projects Google are developing which don’t get a lot of press attention. Here’s a few which have got me thinking…

uProxy

uProxy is a browser extension that lets users share alternative more secure routes to the Internet. It’s like a personalised VPN service that you set up for yourself and your friends. uProxy helps users protect each other from third parties who may try to watch, block, or redirect users’ Internet connections.

This project is an experiment in enabling people to provide each other with a more secure and private connection to the internet. At the moment, it is under active development and we are interested in working with a limitted number of testers to help develop the tool.

Yes can you imagine what fun you could have with uProxy and how easy it makes Proxying? Some Tor clients are simple but this could be really interesting as it adds a social aspect. This is fantastic for those trusted connections, such as friends whose ISP’s are blocking certain sites.

Google+ Ripples

I missed this and I’m sure many others did too. But Google+ Ripples visualises how things are shared on Google+. Now this might sound a bit lame as your not using G+ at the moment but the fact Google are sharing this data with the users, is encouraging.

Handwriting comes to Google

Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

Sound good, can’t wait to try this out. Be fun to try it on my tablet

Aviate your phone?

A while ago I tried out Facebook Home but in the end gave up on it.

The open power of Android does mean it can have a totally different user interface like what HTC, Samsung, etc do. I’m currently running CynaogenMod’s Trebuchet 1.0 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7+ and Nemus Launcher on my HTC OneX. So I’m already using a non-standard UI on my devices.

I quite liked FB Home, but I really wanted it to based on my Twitter or Google+ activity not FB. Along comes Aviate and my ears perk up.

Aviate is an intelligent home screen replacement that’s designed to show you relevant information depending on where you are or the time of day. It categorizes your apps so they’re organized, proactively shows you relevant information so you don’t have to look for it, and it looks great in the process.

Many of the home screen and launcher replacements we’ve seen focus primarily on giving you a way to personalize and customize your home screen without focusing too much on utility. That’s fine, but Aviate takes a different approach. If you’re at the gym, it’ll surface your workout apps so you can get to them quickly. When you wake up, it’ll show you what you have going on that day, like the weather, upcoming appointments, and anything you’ve missed overnight. When you get to work, your productivity apps are front and center. Plus, Aviate does all of this by automatically changing your home screen layout so it’s useful whenever you pick up your phone.

The app pays attention to your location, time of day, calendar, and other saved data to adapt to your needs in a proactive way. Each of the “cards” with widgets, information, tools, or app collections can be edited too, so if you don’t like what Aviate is suggesting, you can change it so it suits you. Plus, the app recommends new apps to try that it thinks you’ll love based on the ones you have installed and popular apps among Aviate users.

Sounds good but can I get a invite code? Can I heck…!

Oh well… if you got one, please do send one this way thanks…

Dreamboard starts a trend

What people dreamabout

Dreamboard I have wrote about a few times before and I have been using the application on my tablet to remember my dreams. But recently people like Simon have been contacting me about shadow which to be fair sounds a lot more like a cross between Dreamboard and Lucidpedia.

Building a community of dreamers sounds cool but very difficult to do. I don’t know if a kickstarter project is the best way, specially when you have the likes of the same information on lucidpedia and many other places across the web. Nope I would suggest something like OKTrends is the way to go. Data like I suggested for mydreamscape would be super valuable to many people including advertisers.

But of course dreamboard are already two steps down that road…

Dreamboard, the largest database of dreams in the world – obtained by a patented system for data collection – has officially entered the second stage of its development: the analysis of the great amount of data collected with a scientific and multidisciplinary approach in order to identify patterns of different nature.

Our scientific team has grown, and is now guided by Professor Patrick McNamara, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine and Dissertation Chair at Northcentral University. He has been active studying sleep and dreams for two decades and is a winner of NIH awards to study sleep and dreams, before becoming Chief Scientific Advisor of Dreamboard. He will work with our first Scientific Advisor, Prof. Bruno Bara, M.D., Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Director of the Center for Cognitive Science, Director of the Center for Neuroimaging, Director of the Schools of Cognitive Psychotherapy of Como and Torino.

Impressive stuff, I look forward to some serious findings to come from our aggregated data.

It was also good to clarify the Facebook link, which is just to do a login and not share private data.

Does Manchester need a tech night?

Geek Graffiti

My friend Chris has something which has been bugging him. He told me while we had a late breakfast in VividLounge.

There’s something that’s bugged me about events in Manchester’s tech scene for a while. There are a lot of great specialist events, and a lot of networking events, but there appears to be little in between, ones that cross knowledge sharing with networking, other than the now-defunct Social Media Cafe, the Northern Digitals BLAB Talks, and ThoughtWorks’Manchester Geek Nights. However, BLAB Talks are geared more towards the creative side of the industry, rather than the technical side and Manchester Geek Nights speakers appear to be limited to ThoughtWorks.

The specialist events are great, but there’s just so many of them, that it’s impossible to attend even just the ones that are interesting to you, and the networking events tend to be heavily geared around alcohol and drinking, which in itself is problematic and can be exclusionary.

When I lived in Oxford there was a great event I attended frequently, Oxford Geek Nights, which basically has a format that fills a gap that I think Manchester now has, so I’d like to start running a monthly series of nights in this format, and hopefully some other people think this is a good idea too.

When I was in London during the first dot com era, I was also going to many specialist events. Most were around startups and money. When that all fell apart the events dried up or became even more specialised. So London geekdinners was started following some loose events in America by the same name. I’ve already mentioned how much of success the girl geekdinners have and are. Funny enough (I believe) the Oxford geek nights were setup following Nat and Simon (founders of Lanyrd) after they enjoyed going to the London Geekdinner and wanted to bring a slice to Oxford. Similarly Geekup and London Tuttle club (forerunner for Social Media Cafe Manchester)

The main reason why I bring up the past again is because there seems to be a cycle. The cycle seems to be flick between general and specific events. Theres certainly a need for both, but sometimes there feels like theres many more of one that the other. Both type of events are tricky to keep going and seem to

Its great Chris feels the need to setup another event, I think it will go down well. I can help with advice on the venue side, but I honestly think a venue won’t be too much of a problem and I certainly would love to talk at one of the events soon.

Make it so, Chris!

I on the other hand won’t be setting up any other events. Between BarCampEdu, 300 Seconds, Quantified Self and a possible next season of Relationships 2.0 (previously called geeks talk sexy). I have little spare time, plus its great when someone else stands up and does something rather than waiting for others.

Although I’ve been thinking about geekdinners 3.0 (maybe to replace relationships 2.0). The tag would be the geeky side of everything… Maybe next year. Rather than people you expect, we would have people from different areas who talk about the geeky side. For example a chef to explain all those different knives, a street artist to explain the world of street art. I tried to do this with geekdinners before but didn’t push beyond the industry much. Maybe now’s the time…?

Make it do, Ian! Maybe I will…

BBC pledges to get the UK coding

Should kids learn programming in school?

Its been a long time in coming but finally its happening. BBC Micro 2.0? Nope better than that.

We (the BBC) are going to get the Nation coding… with the help of others…

Over 30 years ago, the BBC played a leading role in helping Britain get to grips with the first wave of personal computers by putting the BBC Micro into the majority of schools. However, today the UK risks missing out on vital skills that inspired a generation of digital and technical thinkers, as interest in higher–education IT and computing courses falls. The UK currently faces a skills shortage in the technology sector and the BBC aims to help change that.

Of course I knew it was coming but to have it actually announced and from the very top is fantastic. Its worth stopping and thinking about all those people who pushed and pushed to make this all happen.

People like Ant Miller, Michael Sparks, Alan O’Donohoe, Howard Baker, Jo Classens, Keri Facer, Mo McRoberts, George Auckland, Chris Sizemore, and many more and that list is just people attached to the BBC. These are the hero’s who pushed and chipped away. Yes theres the big stuff like Eric Schmitt’s talk at the Edinburgh TV festival, RaspberryPI, Raspberry jams, etc (I actually have a massive mindmap going back a couple of years mapping out the area, which maybe I should blog one day)

As Andy Budd said on Twitter, shame its 2015, to which Michael Sparks said “2015 is relatively realistic given the turning circle of the BBC”

He could be right… The BBC isn’t well known for moving quickly but when its time to do it, hopefully they will do it right… Heck there might even be a BBC Code lab? How freaky would that be… Alan!

All just as the millionth RaspberryPI is made. But honestly the best part of the announcement is the BBC are going to collaborate rather than go it alone.

Details of the programme were limited, but the BBC said that it would partner with government, educators and technology companies. “From working with children and young people, to stimulating a national conversation about digital creativity, the BBC will help audiences embrace technology and get creative,” the corporation said in a blog post.

Of course some of those relationships we’ve built over time will now come into there own.

Is copyright reform on the way?

Torrentfreak has a thoughtful piece about copyright reform. As you can imagine its swings towards a very liberal reform, which sounds about right to me.

Let’s take a look at what happened when the compact cassette arrived. It was sort of an analog removable hard drive with music, that you plugged into an analog music player – the new thing at the time being that you could also write to it. Cassette players popped up everywhere, in particular in a form called ghettoblasters, where you’d carry a rather large box with loudspeakers and two cassette slots around, not to mention quite a few batteries.

Note that I wrote two cassette slots. All of these players also advertised how good they were at copying cassette tapes. You’d pop in the source tape, put a blank tape in the recording slot, and hit a gigantic button named “copy”. This was a feature that was heavily advertised – the better the blasters were at copying, the more music its owner would be able to collect.

The record industry at the time went absolutely ballistic, and said “home taping is killing music” in a largely ridiculed campaign. The bands at the time gave them the finger and printed that logo with the text “home taping is killing record industry profits” instead, adding “we left the reverse side [of the tape] blank, so you can help”. Nevertheless, this was the start of the war against ordinary people copying, something that has only escalated to ridiculous levels today. (Can you imagine a two-slot DVD player being sold today that would have a huge red button marked COPY on it?)

Nice example which later goes on…

When today’s teenagers have grown up enough to be pulling the strings, do you really believe they’ll buy the fairytale stories of how the monopoly construct that all of them saw as plainly abusive, oppressive, and extortionate is needed “for the artists to get paid”? When all they saw – when all everybody saw – was a monopoly construct that silenced artists, silenced challenges to the establishment’s status quo, killed technological innovation, and made sure that rich multinational corporations could buy the power they wanted?

There’s not a chance they’ll buy the fairytale stories from the copyright industry. They’ll all remember their own firsthand experiences. And they’ll kill the monopoly entirely, to thunderous applause.

I certainly like to imagine this to be true, but it doesn’t seem to include the fact people, the average slide of people towards a conservative outlook.

Of course this is nothing compared to the works of Lawrence Lessig’s thoughts, which must be read if your interested in this area.