The slow death of Shoreditch?

Manchester Northern Quarter

Alex talks about the slow death of Shoreditch in a post.

Maybe it’s because during the Olympics politicians were invited to an area of town they wouldn’t have been caught dead in previously. Maybe on those trips to Old Street they realised it’s full of nice post-industrial buildings that would make for the types of fantastic loft spaces they experience in New York. Maybe it’s because they compare Shoreditch to the City and think that housing would help liven it up during weekends. Maybe if they’d lived in Hackney, they’d understand why they should just leave it be and stick to the initial plan to support startups and a tech community not give bankers a chance to live 10 minutes away from work.

One of the many reasons why Shoreditch works for startups is precisely its crap, badly heated, badly connected post-industrial buildings that don’t cost a fortune. That’s why there was an industry there in the first place right? And also everyone’s here, for now. (I’m already starting to hear of friends and colleagues relocating south of the river or even more east, where prices aren’t crazy.)

I do understand where shes coming from but another part of me wonders what she and others, think was going to happen?

Once Silicon roundabout was named and appeared in the likes of Wired magazineThe rest was a forgone conclusion.

Shoreditch featured heavily in the first dot com era too. But that was short lived, too many people using there investment money to buy themselves Audi TT’s it seemed like. This time there might have been something there but it quickly sold its self as the only place to be for startups, which simply isn’t true. London has a lot of space to offer and south of the river there is a lot of unused and unloved buildings just waiting for someone to do something with.

As someone whos lived on the edge of regenerated areas a few times its what happens and you learn to live with it.

In years to come they will say the same thing of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. You can already feel the push into Piccadilly Basin. In the last few months theres been at least 5 new bars in an area which was pretty much canal and housing. I remember when Kate too me there when I first arrived in Manchester. I thought it was great spot for bars and restaurants but up till recently the likes of the Moon have failed. I can imagine the rent is cheaper but there is the influence of the northern quarter heading towards Piccadilly for sure.

Changes is the only thing which is consistent…

The Year after we were meant to be making love

Psychologists Emma and Tomas talk about how science is important when it comes to matchmaking and we see how the couples were matched for the Year of Making Love.

Right its over… 6 episodes of BBC Three TV episodes. It couldn’t have gone so well because on the 4th episode, it got shifted around in the schedule and in the end I had to find it on iPlayer to finish off the series.

The last episode does have a look back and goes considers the science a little more but frankly lets talk maths (bear in mind I never studied it beyond GCSEs)…

Originally it was meant to be 1000 single people matched to 500 couples. That didn’t happen so it was roughly 300 couples matched on the big day and then who knows how many couples were matched afterwards to make up the original 500 couples. However! we don’t know that for sure because there’s never been any data released about it. So lets say 500 couples matched over a few months…

Out of the 500 couples which were matched, about 20+ of them made it to the screen. Most ended after the first date or soon after. Only 3 made it through a year  and are still together now? Funny enough out of the 3 which did make it. 2 of them are from the later matches not the original match day. Tweak to the algorithm?

So frankly 500 to 3 is a terrible result! I mean would you sign up to a dating site where 166 people need to get in touch before you find one worth following (would you?). 1/166.666 is pretty bad odds! And we don’t know if they changed the questionnaire or changed the formula half way through? I certainly didn’t fill in 100’s of questions. You can’t claim scientific if its certainly not…

I’m sure (heard) there are others who are still together but we never saw them. It could be because they weren’t attractive enough to be on TV? or maybe there were no one else? Another question for the programme commissioners.

To be frank, the odds are maybe better if you go down your local deansgates lock, big market, etc and try pulling people. Heck a lot less people would be hurt or have there hopes raised

I’ve dated a lot but I guarantee you if I was to date 166 people on OKCupid I would be in a serious relationship now. I do understand what Emma and Tomas are saying about the one but unforgivably the programme didn’t back up there thoughts. Even Emma shouts at one point, how people are too busy considering the looks not the person. The thing they hadn’t considered or calculated in to the theory was Chemistry. Chemistry is important… and no ones quite got that part figured out, no matter what anyone says

Someone should really do a proper scientific trial… and give up some data about how it went. Maybe I’ll ask around to see if there’s any anonymous data we can get from the year of making love?

Continue readingThe Year after we were meant to be making love

Facebook Timeline Is The Perfect Personal Ad

My Facebook timeline

I said this years ago here as lifestreaming dating…

Facebook’s Timeline and Graph Search is going to change the online dating industry, forever and for the better. People Media, Spark, Cupid PLC and all the other niche networks will popular for years to come, and Match certainly isn’t quaking in their boots.

And I’m not saying that Facebook is going to put the dating industry out of business. What I’m saying is that the layout of the new Timeline is what I’ve been begging the dating industry to do for at least five years and it’s a huge leap in the right direction towards more dynamic and comprehensive profiles. Pair that with Graph Search and Facebook (unintentionally?) becomes the largest dating site in the world, just like that.

I never really followed up on the lifestreaming dating but just watched how Facebook changed more towards social dating and added social graph features.

Looks like the Pacemaker app goes iOS?

Big Boom boxPacemaker?

Seems through out the South by south west festival those guys behind the Pacemaker were out in force with an ipad?

Yes strange but I assume the deal with Blackberry ended and they ported the software to another platform. iOS it seems, going by whats in his hands? Shame because I had hoped developing the app for the Blackberry would make it easy to port to Android.

Nothings been announced yet but it seems pretty obvious to me at least… Which begs the question if I would buy a ipad just as a dj tool? Unlikely…

Mind hacking, now were talking…

vanishing

Hacking software, then hardware, your car, reality, life and now the mind…?

Two trends growing/converging into into each other. Lucid dreaming as a sport? and Hacking the Subconscious Mind? The equipment is low cost and recording although not scientific can be pretty straight forward. Mindhacking is all the rage?

Avi Rubin says he’s worried about this

Could someone hack your pacemaker? At TEDxMidAtlantic, Avi Rubin explains how hackers are compromising cars, smartphones and medical devices, and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world.

I’m less worried… even in the face of other thoughts.

We sell all the time

Daniel Pink signing my bookDan Pike's To sell is human

I have to say I found Drive really interesting and quite enjoyed Dan Pink’s previous works. I’m now looking forward to reading my newly signed To sell is human book.

The idea we all sell and its actually one of the most human of things is intriguing. Influence can be used for good and used for bad, and the idea of selling certainly does conjure up lots of negative thoughts, like Dan points out here.

While listening I was thinking about the human need to influence and mementic theory.

Got to say Dan Pink certainly makes convincing points and it was a pleasure to see him live again (thanks to Thinking Digital and LJMU)

Build for asynchronous communication

When I was at University studying Interaction design many moons ago. We once had a live brief set by Mitsubishi. This was believe it or not in the hay days of 2.5g aka GPRS and if your lucky EDGE. However the promise of these mobile technologies was the ability to be online all the time.

I wrote my dissertation about the promise of 3G and how it ultimately was hype which the consumer would be let down by. Watching 4G you could pretty much replace the number…

but what I’m more concerned about is the amount of apps which assume your online always.

This seems insane specially with the amount of tablets which only have Wifi & Bluetooth connections.

A couple which have really bugged me recently…

Instapaper
I like Instapaper specially when they introduced the option to send your list to the Kindle for free. In fact I dropped Pocket/Read it later soon after that. Heck I’m even a subscriber paying my 1 pound per month for the service. The instapaper apps on Android mainly are all good but when saving a post out of my Google Reader to Instapaper its failed due to not being online! This is frankly stupid. A few I have tried include PaperMill (my current Instapaper reader), Everpaper, Papermache and many more. So bad, I actually have the one app (send to instapaper) which does it correctly installed along side Papermill.

From the developer of send to instapaper,

Save a URL to Instapaper to read later even if your phone is not currently connected to Internet.

I wrote this app because all available Instapaper clients on the Market fail to work in offline mode. When I decide to bookmark a URL in Instapaper these apps make a request to Instapaper server right away. They of course fail if I am not on the Internet, a common situation when I am reading on my phone in Prague subway on my way to work.

This “Send To Instapaper” app is intelligent enough to know the phone is not online. It would store user requests in a little database and submit them to Instapaper.com later when the phone gets connected to Internet.

And the developer is so right… Its not hard it just takes a little thinking about the user scenarios.

I wish it was just a one off but its not and the developers should be frankly ashamed.

Why I shut down BBC backstage

BBC Backstage Meets the NW communities networking bash

George sent me a tweet saying how much Elizabeth Murdoch loved BBC Backstage, as she mentioned it in her speech to the Edinburgh TV Festival last year.

The BBC has been the market leader for building new relationships and services with creative’s from every sector. Be it the early ground breaking Backstage initiative for technology engineers.

Shes right and it does beg the question, why is there no more BBC Backstage?

I thought this was covered in the BBC Backstage ebook which was put together by the lovely Suw. But it looks like I may have been slightly mistaken. On top of this, I keep making reference to this blog post which I never seem to quite finish. So enough, its finished and out there for all to read…

First misconception: The BBC never shutdown BBC Backstage

Actually I did… When I first mentioned the possibility of closing down BBC Backstage to Adrian (my manager) he thought I had totally lost it. I remember a meeting with Adrian and Matthew (head of R&D) where I talked about shutting it down and I gave my reasoning which made soften the blow a little. I had thought long and hard about leaving BBC Backstage and passing it on to someone else younger and full of energy (I even had a number of names put forward to consider). But it didn’t make sense.

The problems with Backstage were not about who was running it but more about what was happening around it (as we will see in number 4)

Second misconception: The BBC sits on a ton of data.

The core of BBC Backstage was the backstage license which is founded on non-commercial reuse of data. This gave backstage the license to go around the BBC educating/persuading/convincing stakeholders about the benefits of open data at a time when data wasn’t a big thing. The problem is the data wasn’t ours. For example the Met Office would make the weather data available to the BBC under strict licensing. Deals were done for non-commercial use and it was always neigh impossible to reverse a deal without effecting the production side of the things.

Lots of people imagine most of Backstage was hacks. In actual fact lots of it was people experimenting.

Third misconception: Developers found new business models

This backs off the non-commercial problem. Because everything was under the non-commercial license, when things like the Apple App Store came along and offered developers clear ways to make money from their work. We had to shut down a lot of prototypes and tell people not to use BBC backstage data in there apps.

This was actually a issue from early on when Google Adsense, offered developers a nice way to make a small amount of money based on numbers of people who came to the site. It was argued that if developers made enough money to just cover the hosting of the prototype, we could turn a blind eye to. This wasn’t sustainable as it kept coming back to bite every once in a while. But it wasn’t till the App stores when the number of prototypes and services wanting to go commercial blew up.

Once developers learned it was actually against the terms and conditions, they naturally moved on to other platforms.  We did talk to BBC Worldwide many times about working together but it just wasn’t to be.

Forth misconception: The Open Data Revolution passed it by

Backstage had a hand in getting this revolution going in the UK and beyond. 7 years later, we had influenced everyone from other companies to the government. We were there right at the start of this revolution and fundamentally changed the BBC’s thinking about data. However it was clear this was just the start and as a part of BBC R&D, it was right to move on and have the same impact in another emerging area. The developer network part of Backstage was tricky to balance with the push to drive forward.

We did think about splitting it off and working in partnership with others who were later to the scene but it just didn’t quite happen and in the era of cost cutting and doing the things which really have an impact for our audiences it was harder to justify.

Fifth misconception: It was all about DRM and the BBC wanted rid

Looking at the mailing list, its easy to imagine it being all about DRM and not a lot else. But in actual fact while the DRM debates rages on, there were lots of people creating and making lots of prototypes. Lots of them were documented on the website but there were some which were so illegal there was no way I could put them anywhere public. Those were more of a look what we could do…

Even though they were much more black/grey around the licensing terms, they drove the imagination and clearly got a number of us thinking what if…? One such example is the widely talked about blast from the past called Panadora PVR (now called Promise.TV) which lead to Tom Loosemore’s talk at Etech 2007, the Edinburgh TV unfestival and the building of the infamous BBC Redux.

The BBC gained a lot from having the debate and being rather open about it all.

Sixth misconception: There was no money or love for BBC Backstage

This is somewhat true and false. Yes it became more difficult to justify and we had gone through quite a difficult patch, while losing some key people to project. On top of that we had a new head of Future Media (Erik Huggers), moved into BBC R&D and was shifting the project up to the north of England to fit in with BBC’s increasing push to solve the London and South East bias.

Everything was changing and everytime we took BBC Backstage in a different direction, there was push back from the dedicated community. To me this is the way of the world (forever changing) but it certainly makes funding such projects difficult when you want a 3-5 year plan.

There was much love for BBC Backstage from Future Media and other departments in the BBC, there was lots of talk about setting up other Backstages in different areas as a outreach project alone it hit audiences the BBC was not so good at having conversations with. The formula was repeatable but should it be? We could have done Mashed all over the UK but was that a good idea? I certainly didn’t think so and ultimately my thoughts about driving forward were correct.

Seventh misconception: We ran out of steam

Ok this might be true to a certain extent. But not from the lack of trying… You only have to look at the new things I’ve been working on since, including Channelography, Perceptive Media, etc. There is still fire in myself and I still have a lot to give… During that time, I will admit I was well over worked and I was being contacted by many people on the off chance just because I was out in the open. This certainly slowed down daily looking through BBC emails. Hence why I now have a another BBC email.

Ultimately I want to thank everyone who has been involved in BBC Backstage in the past (too many to name). The decision was made under a ton of stress on my part but I felt I was making the correct decision for everyone including the founders, the BBC and the community. Then and even now. I mean can you imagine BBC Backstage in 2013!?

Things need to end (such as BBC Backstage, Innovation Labs, etc) for others to spark, grow and mature like BBC Connected Studio.

 

Northology podcast ep 8 with Ian Forrester

Ian Forrester

Not long after blogging about Northology and the other great things happening in Manchester, its great to be on the show.

This week Nathan talks to Ian Forrester, a Senior Producer with BBC Research and Development, about his move from London to Salford, his work with BBC Backstage and how narrative and story telling is changing.  He also talks online dating, bar camp, geek dinners and many other things he’s involved in.

The interview was a quick thing and before I even knew it was over. Which means I didn’t quite get everything I wanted to say into the interview.

Judge for yourself by listening here or subscribing here.

A mindmapping standard?

I am having a hard time finding mindmapping apps which support a number of thing.

My idea was to install Freemind/Freeplane and then find a way to edit the mindmaps from Freemind on my Samsung Tab 7+ but can i find anything which supports it? Nope! So I considered the fact freemind might not be the ideal format and maybe I could import and export into freemind for editing on my Ubuntu laptop.

There seems to be no solid universal mindmap format which most mindmapping apps can read and write. It also seems export and import is very hit and miss.

The problem seems to be each one wants to innovate on top of a moving base in a different way and lock their users into using that application. A couple have apps across different platforms. Of course those platforms don’t include Linux making them almost pointless for myself.

What do people use and how do they get around the problem of converting back and forth? It seems crazy that this stuff isn’t described in XML or RDF with SVG for strokes?

Someone tell me something which works on Ubuntu and Android? Please!