Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011. It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality. Here are my thoughts from the day. Farmification Of Factories Fascinating talk from Lisa Ma about living and working with workers in a Chinese joystick factory. Raises interesting questions about…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTEqKd92kcI Pop quiz: How many MB did you use watching that YouTube video? When dealing with data usage, a familiar cry in the telco world is “Customers just don’t understand what a MB is!” Is this true? The theory goes something like this… Some elements of a phone bill are easy to conceptualise. Customers understand how many minutes they’ve used, texts they’ve sent, etc. T…
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Surrey County Council have sent every household in the county a booklet explaining how our council tax is being spent. Within it is a highly political comment from Kevin Hurley, the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner. He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it and ask yourself this question: what percentage is spent on "Employees". Please use this poll to record your guess - answers at the end of this blog. Pie charts have a long and…
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This weekend, I went to Rewired State's Parliament hackday. I teamed up with amazing front end designer Max Bye and statistician par excellence John Sandall to create a data visualisation of Parliament's Demographics. Are the houses representative of the people in terms of gender diversity? Are the Labour Party younger than the Conservatives? Are the parties in the Lords particularly dissimilar? You can play with the hack or watch a video demonstration. Each bubble represents a…
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For years I was a BlackBerry fanboy. I remember snatching a departing colleague's 6710 and lying to the IT department that I was authorised to have my email on my phone. I never looked back. Despite a brief flirtation with the Nokia N95 - I was a BlackBerry Boy through and through. Until this happened. In early March 2010, my beloved BlackBerry Bold took a tumble out of a cab and died. I've been an Android man ever since. Magic, Hero, Nexus, Galaxy - all great phones, but none could…
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A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk about the trials and tribulations of using open - and not so open - data. Instead, I gave a more…
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ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET* *One plate only, limit of half a sausage per person, no refills, persons weighing over 75Kg will have to pay a supplement, does not include ice-cream. Doesn't really seem fair, does it? The Internet industry loves to abuse the word "Unlimited" - the mobile industry is particularly bad. Despite complaints from the public, the Advertising Standards Authority recently ruled that "unlimited means limited" We noted that that information showed only a very small …
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VoteUK is no more. In order to precisely show you where your electoral registration office was, I needed to take its postcode and covert it to latitude and longitude. That's the service Ernest Marples provided. A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running Ernest Marples. The Post Office charges for the file that they generated which converts post codes to location. It can cost anywhere from £1,000 to £4,000 per year to get accurate data…
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My Humm Energy monitor is now fully set up. It's been churning away gently admonishing me for going over my kWh allowance for the day. As I mentioned in the unboxing - there's an integrated 2GB SD card for the Duet to record the energy usage. As the trial progresses, I should be able to upload the data to the website for them to analyse. They faithfully promise to send me a spreadsheet of the data if I want it. Well, what kind of geek would I be if I didn't have a tinker with it my self :-…
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Tim Berners-Lee has made a call for governments to open up their data. Indeed, Tim's been appointed by the UK government to do just that. His central thesis is that we, the taxpayers, have paid for government research and data - we should be able to access it. Easy, free and unfettered access to raw, unadulterated data will allow us to do wonderful things. Take a look at his recent TED Talk, it's inspiring stuff. I think there's a fatal flaw in his plan. Data, in its raw form is hard to…
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I was deeply honoured to be asked to present the keynote address at the Mobile Data Association's "Monetising The Mobile Internet in Tough Times". I was a last minute stand-in for Henry Stevens of the GSMA. You can download the day's presentations directly, but as slides only tell half the story, I've written a brief commentary to what I was presenting. Naturally a presentation or blog post cannot capture all the questions & and answers (nor my "inimitable style") but I'll do my best. O…
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