My daughter has just had to dramatically narrow down the subjects she does at school. I faced the same dilemma 40 years ago when I was forced to choose between science and the arts. I thought I’d slammed the door shut on art when I chose Computer Science. Looking back on four decades in the […]
Reflections on 40 years in tech
The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Winston Churchill The Web is 30 years old this week. And today is my birthday. 40 years ago, I was told, NO! You can’t do arts AND science. It’s just not done. Besides, the timetables clash. But I insisted and after […]
Betting on Bitcoin
5 years ago a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist bet a financial journalist a pair of Alpaca socks that by now at least 10% of the US public would be using Bitcoin to buy stuff on a regular basis. Who won the bet? A few weeks ago, VC Ben Horowitz and the disbelieving journalist Felix […]
Search the web to plant trees
The teenager mentioned that she’d planted her first tree. What? ‘Since when did you take an interest in gardening?’ I asked. What she meant was that she had started using a new search engine where for every 50 searches they’d plant a tree. ‘Everyone’ at her school is now using it. This sounded too interesting […]
Marketing skill sets and superpowers
Let me guess. You felt you were missing out and so decided you’d better ‘do some marketing’. So you hire a tech-savvy millennial to tweet and boost the odd Facebook post. Maybe they even setup Google Analytics. After all, data is the new oil, right? You read somewhere that blogging is good for business. So […]
Functional / Emotional Fit
What is your product or service for? In response to this, most of us will immediately think about what sort of functional problem we are solving for our customers. Perhaps you’re Retail Bank C offering a bank account service to help me manage my money from day to day. Great, I need that. But is […]