Bradley Howard's Blog

2011 favourites

Dec 27, 2011 at 2:29pm

Last year I wrote about my 2010 favourites and it was one of my most viewed posts of the year. So I thought I’d repeat it for 2011 too - and there's a clear theme running through these favourites!

Favourite new gadget

One of the things I’ve really got involved with in 2011 has been cycling. It started in February when I was out of breath going up a local (yet very long and steep) hill, then got to June where a group of friends rode the BHF London to Brighton. I then started riding into work (13 miles, from North West London to the City).

Three rear wheels later, thanks to the Holloway Road, I decided to go for a new bike. My £27 eBay investment (see below) had had its day after almost 1,800 miles between May and December.

22447_271498797316_515682316_4936440_5970254_n

However my favourite gadget wasn’t the new bike, it was the base layer clothing. Base layers have been around for a few years and despite some literally freezing motorcycle journeys, I hadn’t used one until cycling this winter. They are fantastic and if you get cold easily, try wearing them under your clothes. There you go, a favourite gadget that doesn’t run out of batteries!

Favourite book

Without a doubt, it was Lance Armstrong’s autobiography. It’s a very easy read that is very emotional about someone’s battle with cancer, from denial through to winning the Tour de France afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.

In second place was Alan Sugar’s autobiography which was several times longer than Armstrong’s, but just as enjoyable.

Favourite iPhone app

I’ve started using Barclays Boris bikes to travel around the City if the meeting is only one or two tube stops from the office. So the BarclaysBikes app is really handy, showing how many bikes and spaces are at a specific location. The AR (Augmented Reality) view is genuinely useful to find the nearest bike.

A close second is the updated LinkedIn app. The previous version never seemed to work without wifi. The latest app is excellent for looking up contacts after a meeting or even in the middle of a meeting when we’re discussing a mutual ex-colleague.

For outside work, the Geocaching app is excellent. It shows the three nearest geocaches and makes a spare hour disappear quicker than you can say “Where on earth would someone have hidden it around here?”

Favourite award

Without a doubt, I was extremely proud of the team to receive to a Sitecore Site of the Year award this year for our work with Cadbury.

tags:

LinkedIn, London to Brighton bike ride, application review, awards, bicycles, book review, iPhone, mobile, motorcycles,

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Holiday news

Sep 1, 2011 at 9:05am

This week I've returned from a fortnight's holiday and for what was always considered a 'quiet period', there was a lot of news in the technology world:

Apple's Steve Jobs stepped down. Earlier this year I read the book 'From Good to Great' where one of the requirements of a great company over a good, high performing company, is that the former is able to lose key individuals and still grow successfully. There have been many good companies but when a key person has left, the company has lost it's way. Apple is currently the best of the good companies, and only time will tell whether it's one of the greats.
Eric Schmidt gave a great speech highlighting two key factors - the UK has invented so many high tech products, yet has been unable to commercialise them, and secondly the dwindling number of students studying maths and science. Both are sad positions to be in, and the second one is the worrying trend which needs to be addressed.
HP have bought Autonomy. I've never come across a company that so few people know what they do (Autonomy, not HP). 30,000 people a week probably sit in White Hart Lane wondering what their shirt sponsor does. As for the actual aquisition, I agree with Tech Market View that it's another sad day for British enterprise, and Eric Schmidt's words above simply echo our lack of commercialisation - why can't the UK create companies that buy US companies?
Google buying Motorola was a complete shock. The cynic in me thinks that Google bought the cheaper company, to spark Microsoft's interest in buying Nokia, which would eat up a huge amount of Microsoft's cash reserve and put it in a weaker position. Quite why any company would want to buy a handset provider - customers are extremely fickle and disloyal in the mobile market, and Apple are going from strength to strength. Oh, and there's the subject of huge investment required to knock the iPad off the top perch.

There was some good news while I was away though, I finished reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography and whilst I won't do a full book review like usual, I thoroughly recommend it. I couldn't put the book down and ended up reading it in four days - not an easy task when you go on holiday with four kids.

tags:

HP, apple, book review, business, google, mobile, news,

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Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Mar 1, 2011 at 9:10am

Weeknotes seem to be the new compromise between micro-blogging (aka Twitter) and full on blogging. Take a look at Weeknote - it's quite a neat site if you have something to say but don't want to be constrained to 140 characters.

Marc Holmes and others have started adopting a nice approach to their blogs, by including a weeknote every errrrrr.... seven days, so I thought I'd try it too. So here goes for the last week:

Launched The Race Season on SpotsVStripes - a new campaign as part of Cadbury's sponsorship of London 2012. A very addictive set of Flash games. And a new chocolate bar (the Race Bar - try it and let me know what you think). Here's the TV advert:

Found an excellent new utility for capturing tall web pages as images.
On a personal note - last week was officially the first time it cost more than £20 to fill up my motorbike. I'm not complaining too much, considering a bottle of water at Euston station costs £1.50 (that's 20p more per litre than petrol).
Using Timely more and more for writing loads of tweets in one session, then letting them 'go live' over the course of the week.
Finished reading Lord Sugar's auto-biography, loving virtually every word of it. Worst of all, I didn't have another book ready to start reading, so I'm back to the Metro each day. Another reason to use the bike more!
Read a couple of good articles - one which said that in the US most Internet shoppers are pretty affluent; the second is debating whether we're in a second dotcom bubble.
I got my data back from a faulty hard disk.
Learnt what the word undecillion means during a session on IPv6. (10 to the power of 36).
A fair amount of cycle rides (two sessions of 20+ miles) and a 2.5 run around the block. All in the aim of completing this year's London to Brighton quicker than last year and being a stone lighter at the same time.
Watched that match...

tags:

London to Brighton bike ride, Weeknote, application review, blogging, book review, business, motorcycles, twitter,

3 Comments

Book review: Alan Sugar's Autobiography

Feb 23, 2011 at 4:03pm

I’ve been extremely lucky recently with some book recommendations. I’ve been recommended a number of titles including “Who Moved My Cheese?”, “Tipping Point” and “When I Stop Talking You’ll Know I’m Dead”.

Both my father (coincidentally a "Happy Anniversary" to my parents today) and brother-in-law have been reading Alan Sugar’s autobiography recently – called ‘What You See Is What You Get’ and they kept saying I should read it. My brother-in-law was first to finish it, and I read it cover to cover in under a fortnight. I just couldn’t put the thing down. For the first time ever, I missed my tube station on my way home from work!

Sugar is incredibly frank in the book. He regularly refers to a number of his suppliers and customers as tossers, wankers and other similarly colourful adjectives. He is completely transparent when it comes to costs and profit margins in certain deals, and just as open to boast how he screwed over a number of retailers at certain points in history.

Sir/Lord Alan Sugar's early years are just as interesting as his recent political appointments. I found it fascinating how he watched road workers digging up lumps of wood in the 1950s that burned really efficiently and so he sold them to his neighbours. He bought a batch of radios that didn’t quite work, so he setup a production line at home to tweak a single component in each radio to enable them to work. One night all his stock was stolen from his rear garden, so he build a concrete out-house. Self-made? Quite literally.

At the start of one of his chapters he explains how a psychotherapist would have a field day with him. That’s an understatement. He switches from this openly caring fellow to admitting he was bored senseless at the lunch table with the Queen (not sure if he would have been knighted after being so open with his encounters with royalty).

His time as the owner of Spurs is interesting because up until that point, he’d made his fortune simply by buying cheap components, assembling them and selling them – making a good profit along the way – how simple could a business be. Suddenly at Spurs he was juggling mega-personalities – Venables (my opinion of him has changed), George Graham, Jürgen Klinsmann, Darren Anderton (my opinion of him has only been reinforced), the list goes on.

Personally I found the chapter on Sir/Lord Sugar describing his encounters with other Premier League chairmen and their negotiations with Sky the most interesting. I’ve had the fortune to work with some Premier League chairmen, and after building up my impression of Sugar via the first few chapters, I couldn’t imagine someone more opposite to the chairmen I know. So when he describes the meetings, I found myself cringing at some of the tales.

Sugar is hugely opinionated (one of the reasons we all like The Apprentice so much). Despite most of the country disliking Gordon Brown, Sugar joined his team at Brown's lowest rating. He sacked Venables. In fact, he sacked a lot of people. This all sounds terribly negative, and is balanced in the book by acknowledgements of making many of his employees very wealthy in their own right.

Before reading Baron/Lord Sugar’s book, I read Jerry Weintraub’s autobiography. Both are self-made, hugely successful businessmen with the same culture and principles to help guide them through life. OK, Jerry is American and naturally a lot more brash. Sugar is typically English and keeps repeating “Bloody hell, I grew up on a council estate in Clapton, and here I am doing blah” – eating with the Queen, 4 prime ministers, TV celebrity, floating his business on the stock market – the list just goes on and on.

What's nice about Baron/Sir Sugar's book is the level of detail. At first, 600 pages seems too long. But like many well written books, the pages just whizz past and your detailed knowledge of the author becomes deeper and deeper.

A thoroughly enjoyable, addictive book. Especially if you’re a psychotherapist.

tags:

book review, business,

5 Comments

Book Review: When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead

Feb 8, 2011 at 8:33am

Actually, the full title of the book is "When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man" by Jerry Weintraub.

I confess that I'd never heard of Jerry Weintraub before. The thing that jumped out at me on the back cover (written by George Clooney) was that he produced the films (if you don't know what a film producer does, this book will explain) Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.

He's done a lot more than that in his colourful life, from playing tennis with both George Bushes (together), taking Elvis and Sinatra on tour (separately), managed George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, as well as learnt how to deal with the mafia (tell the truth and keep the law). Not bad for a child from the Bronx 70 years ago.

He happily divulges his secrets - he doesn't think he's particularly clever, just persistent and excellent at sales. And he demonstrates the same sales process time and time again. One of my favourites was selling the LP sleeve of a John Denver album before Xmas (sending it top of the charts), without the record inside! Because Denver was late finishing the record, and Weintraub sold everyone the concept that you'll get the record later. Hilarious, ridiculous, and gutsy.

He also did a thousand other things which most of us would love to do, each in it's own entertaining way.

The book is really easy to read. I found myself hiding in corners of the house on the weekend trying to read it quicker. I had a bath on Saturday evening (which I only normally do when I have a bad cold) for an hour while I read it. And I must confess it was I who blocked the escalator from the Northern Line at Bank station this morning because I was midway through the chapter on Dancing with the Rebbe.

OK, there's a liberal dose of American-yeehar-I'm-so-successful in there, however you can see that he tries tempering this with the love for his family (parents, brother and children) and friends. His thoughts on death and religion were like having a conversation with a close friend.

And that's the book's style - it's like he's there next to you telling you lots of interesting stories. I still don't know what his voice is like, but I feel like he's been talking to me all weekend!

Thanks to Alex for lending me the book. Alex asked me to pass the book on to the next person. Just remember I spent an hour in the bath with it on Saturday.

tags:

book review, business, management training, sales,

1 Comment

Book review: Tipping Point

Jan 27, 2011 at 9:01am

At a meeting in December a client recommended I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell based on the books I was recommending that he read over the holiday season.

Tipping Point is about what makes a specific idea become mainstream, of 'epidemic' proportion. It do this in two ways - firstly by simplifying the entire process and communication chain from the initial idea through to mainstream, and secondly by referring to some case studies in a level of detail.

Fortunately the book starts with the simplified process, and is very readable with lots of head-nodding. The detailed case studies go into just too much detail although saying that, the case study on how New York changed it's crime rate an fascinating story in itself. I guess it's a case of if the reader believes the simplified model, then the case studies are redundant, but if the reader doesn't quite believe the simplified model, then the case studies may provide some evidence to convince them.

Interestingly Gladwell doesn't talk about technology - all the case studies are pre-Internet - the American Revolution, Hush Puppies and Sesame Street.

However, if you're looking for a book to help you launch your latest website and make it go 'mainstream', the framework Gladwell describes is just as relevant in cyberspace as it is in the case studies that he presents.

For instance, Gladwell describes that the early adopters, or Mavens as he prefers to call them, are absolutely key to the success of a product, whether that's a product, TV show or social change. And our experience at Endava with client sites agrees with the Mavens theory. Think of all the company or brand Facebook Pages (capital P) which only have a few hundred 'fans', compared to other ones which have millions (Manchester United, Starbucks, Adidas, etc).

Mavens are crucial to the success of a new site.

Early adopters are fundamental for launching a new site. Gladwell describes early adopters as natural-born-helpers who want to provide feedback and help start the correct messaging. Think of the early adopters on Twitter or Facebook - these are the people who work out the benefit of using the sites, provide proactive feedback (sometimes without being asked) and then start inviting friends to them.

That's just the start of the communication chain, and Gladwell defines each of the links in the chain very simply and practically.

The book is definitely worth reading. My advice is that if you find yourself agreeing with the first third of the book, there's no compelling reason to read the rest of it. Except for how New York changed its crime rate.

tags:

book review, social media,

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2010 favourites

Dec 27, 2010 at 12:23pm

Here is a summary of some of the best parts of 2010.

Favourite new gadget

I still think homeplugs are the best gadget for home. They are much more reliable than wireless, and feel quicker. They can't win the 2010 award because I've had them for a few years now.

Best new purchase of the year was a new A3 network printer for home. The quality is so good that I've stopped using Photobox, and just print from home using original Brother inks on Photo Paper Direct (pearl) paper.

Favourite book

Future Files by Richard Watson. I've bought probably half a dozen times for different people, and bored many dinner crowds by talking about the future of education, consumer brands and commerce.

Favourite iPhone app

Perhaps Facebook in terms of usage, but definitely Evernote for random note taking whether its text, photo or anything else. And it syncs with the computer application and website.

Close second place is the BTFON app, which allows BT Broadband customers to connect to Openzone Wifi without needing to manually sign in all the time. Special mention to the eBay selling app which creates a listing in under 30 seconds - by far the best user experience on a mobile app.

Favourite award

Coming 16th in the New Media Age Top 100 Interactive Agencies award was a great milestone for Endava and makes me extremely proud of the team.

tags:

awards, book review, iPhone,

2 Comments

Book review: Future Minds

Dec 19, 2010 at 9:40am

Just reading Future Minds by Richard Watson was a story in itself!

I started reading the book as soon as it was released, because after I read Watson's first book, I've been thinking about his trends of the future ever since, and regularly comment on his blog. About one and a half chapters from the end though, I lost the book on the tube one night (after a few "sherbets" I should add), never to be seen again. I emailed Watson, asked for a second copy and it arrived. Thank you Richard. I waited until I'd finished reading "What Would Google Do?" before finishing off Future Minds.

By Watson's own admission, Future Minds started off as a different book to it's current title. Watson wanted to write a book on the best places to 'think'. What's the most appropriate architectural layout of a building? What works and doesn't work? Is a messy desk more productive than a tidy one? Thankfully my the messy one wins over the tidy one (e.g. my next door neighbour at work!).

Watson has an easy reading style. When I received the second copy of the book, I finished the last chapter and a half in one tube journey into work. And I'm not a fast reader at all.

What I appreciate about Watson's research is that it forces the reader to take a step back from normal life and look at it from a macro view. You want a more personal communication style? Then write a letter rather than a short email. You want a child to learn about something? Then let them read a paper encyclopaedia rather than perform a Google search. While you're reading the book, real life experiences will occur that confirm Watson's narrative. As with the first book, you find yourself like a nodding dog whilst reading it.

Watson goes into the process of creative thinking. Creative thinking will (according to Watson) become vital because machines and efficiency drives (Lidl need fewer shelf stackers because they simply put the pallet on show in the supermarket) will be able to perform a high percentage of all the tasks we currently perform. The only thing machines are less likely to be able to do in the medium term is creativity.

Whilst his attempt at creative thinking is good (we don't get our best creative thinking at work or in front of a computer, so take a long lunch break with the rest of your team and have a glass of wine), the best book I've read on creative thinking is from What If? and I've nothing else seems to come close.

One of Watson's recommendations is that for a day each week, you should turn all devices off, and your thoughts will naturally start to file themselves together, and you'll be able to think much clearer. When I met Watson, I said that this seemed very similar to the monotheistic faiths that all describe a Sabbath as that day of rest. Watson actually goes a step further and said that one day a year, try to do absolutely nothing - again most monotheistic religions have at least one day a year of fasting and all work is forbidden - in order to forget about our usual activities, and be able to concentrate (when was the last time you did that for 10 hours straight?).

I met Watson at the RSA where he gave a talk on the book (a long highlights version is on YouTube). His thoughts clearly polarised the audience. The first question from the audience was a woman who said that last week she opened the front door and saw some black clouds above. She went back inside to look up the weather report on her computer, and when it said "rain", the penny dropped and she realised her reliance on technology had taken over her common sense. Other people simply think he is anti-technology however I think he's trying to call out "Use it in moderation!" In the last 10 to 15 years the general population has jumped head first into social networking, Googling and texting. He's not saying any of those three are necessarily bad, he's just warning that they don't replace face to face friendships, encyclopaedias and conversations respectively.

In summary I found the book as thought provoking as the first one. It's useful to work inside IT/digital media and have someone talk about technology use in moderation, and to remind me that my creative thinking doesn't occur in the office or in front of a PC - like most people, it's upstairs in the shower. Now that's a thought to leave you with.

tags:

Facebook, book review, business, creative, future, google, trends,

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Book review: "What Would Google Do?"

Dec 14, 2010 at 9:14pm

I've just finished reading the book "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis.

Actually, I think that title of the book was probably not the first choice from the author.

The first title Jarvis probably thought of was "The cultural difference between Americans and Brits". The first few chapters are full of example stories of how Jarvis bought a Dell computer, complained, and ended up interviewing Michael Dell (the founder of Dell) himself, and how Jarvis have advised most of the biggest companies on the Internet in ways they could improve.

Jarvis is one of those people who always seems know someone at every company in the World, and probably worked there (sorry, advised them to make them better) at some stage too.

If you (and I'm talking to Brits here) can stand those types of bold claims and self promotion, of which I'm not disputing the accuracy of the claims -- just how liberally they're used through the book; you'll move on to the second part. This part deals with the actual title - how would Google run a restaurant, a hospital, a law firm, and many other industries.

Jarvis is quite creative with his thoughts, although if you work in any of those industries you can't help but admire his naivety at lack of understanding that industry. That naivety is precisely at the core of how Jarvis thinks Google approach any industry though - they reinvent it specifically without wanting to understand how it's been done before.

The final part of the book is a long essay into what Jarvis thinks is good and bad about the Internet, and full of promotion about his blog - why he blogs, how he blogs, why he's so great - and then we're back to that same American style which is probably admired in USAland and sneered at in the UK.

WWGD (as Jarvis calls the book) is an OK read. The book is extremely simplistic - for example it lightly touches with the issue of WHY Google goes into certain industries (to capture more search traffic, more personal/crowd/industry insight data) - he only deals with the end user's perspective. If you work for one of the industries that Jarvis uses as a case study of being Google-ised, you'll sit there nodding your head saying to the book "No, that's not how my industry works" - which is the whole point of the book really.

tags:

blogging, book review, business, culture, google,

0 Comments

Reading the Future

May 20, 2010 at 9:35pm

If I've bumped into you during the last 3 or 4 weeks, I've probably mentioned the book I've been reading - Future Files by Richard Watson.

My introduction to the book began in the reception of a creative agency in central London. I picked up the book from the coffee table and thought the front and back covers described a shallow author who claimed to be a 'futurologist'.

"What a great idea - write a factual book that no one can argue with (or at least, for the next 50 years)", I mocked. "Worse still, he works for some sort of futurology consultancy".

I shared my views of the book to a colleague, and opened it half way. Hmmm, it seemed quite interesting.

Knowing that I had a trip to the New York the next week, I got back to the office and bought a copy from Amazon.

Since the moment it arrived, not only did I have difficulty putting it down, I had difficulty not discussing a number of the points raised in the book with pretty much anyone I met.

The opening chapter pretty much agreed with my original assessment - here was a guy who was interested in articles that described future trends, and decided to make a reasonably light hearted living from it.

via amazon.co.uk

The difference between this book and other futurology books and documentaries is that it only brushes on technology. It's not written by a technologist. This means that Watson often refers to social impact and psychological effects of future events.

For instance, it's hard to deny that we're all obsessed with covering our work surfaces, home surfaces, and even our hands, with antibacterial spray. However it's the generation before us, who never used the spray that are living the longest, and more children are being born with allergies. I've digressed. Watson predicts that in the future we all have defibrillators in the home, blood test machines that send the digital samples via the Internet to a doctor the other side of the World (which we'll use daily), and so on... we will become more and more paranoid in the future.

How can we tell if Watson is right or not - well we can't. However he did predict the global recession triggered by banks and debt (he wrote the book in 2007), and quite honestly, I don't care if his predictions are true or not... the point is that trends are going in a direction and he's trying to see how they are linked together and what the sum of all the parts will be like. For instance I disagree with him about the availability of 'free' - my personal opinion is that we are at a peak in terms of free products and content - and our children won't believe what we have access to in 2010, for no cost.

Watson has produced a map of all the trends that he keeps a tabs of. The maps are available here:

http://www.nowandnext.com/?action=misc&subaction=trend_maps

In a nutshell, if you want to read a book that predicts flying cars, interplanetary transport, Warp speed motorbikes or Internet links implanted in our brains, don't buy this book. If you want a glimpse into the kinds of things that may affect our children and their children in the future, it's definitely worth a read.

My apologies to Richard Watson for the initial mocking - it just proves you can't judge a book by it's cover.

tags:

Amazon, book review, future, trends,

1 Comment

Tags

2011 favourites

Holiday news

Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Book review: Alan Sugar's Autobiography

Book Review: When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead

Book review: Tipping Point

2010 favourites

Book review: Future Minds

Book review: "What Would Google Do?"

Reading the Future

Bradley Howard

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