Bradley Howard's Blog

Views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

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It's not the bankers' fault

Nov 30, 2010 at 9:07am
 

3248070949_d89f5be98c1

After working in the City for a little over 12 months now, I think I've come to realise that it's not the greed of the investment bankers for the recession, it's their environmental bubble called the City of London.

I came into work yesterday, battling with the Tube strike (I don't use the motorbike when it's less than 1 degree), only to see a Ferrari and Maserati driving past the exit to Bank Station. Apparently the bankers are unaffected by Tube strikes.

Today, like 60-odd million other Britons, I woke up to see the country under a white blanket. People on the tube were wearing Wellington boots, hiking boots and clothing suitable for Everest. I came out of Bank station - not a flake of snow had settled on the ground. The snow was like a light rain. The bankers probably didn't even realise the snow had settled outside of The Square Mile.

My point here is that the City of London is like an 'almost artificial' bubble that is unaffected by extremities that the rest of the country faces. And that's not their fault!

Photo courtesy of Jon Curnow.


 
tags:
Endava, banking, business, motorcycles, travel,
0 Comments

NHS Direct

Aug 28, 2010 at 9:58pm
 

What_is_nhs_direct

I was disappointed to hear that the government have decided to shut down NHS Direct for a number of reasons.

On a personal note, as a family we have used the service many times. With four young kids we have all sorts of germs and knocks each month, and we've always received a good service from NHS Direct.

As a concept I think the service is spot on. When we were on holiday last week, one of us felt a bit under the weather. The local hospital was glad to see tourists, for a few hundred pounds on the first consultation. We had travel insurance, but to lay out the money and the aggravation of going to A&E on hospital just didn't appear. Whilst looking through the travel insurance documentation I noticed a phone number to speak to some private nurses, free of charge for the policy. After a quick call they gave a satisfactory opinion, some confident reassurance and suggested remedy. We took their advice and 24 hours later the problem had gone, with no inconvenience of having to claim back any expenses later when we returned from holiday.

If you try to imagine how healthcare will operate (no pun intended) in say, 25 years, I think we'll have a lot more remote healthcare. We will sit at home and have a video call with a doctor based anywhere in the World. As for how the doctor performs his tests (temperature, blood pressure and so on) - these devices are already available with USB connectivity (e.g. this BP monitor or this thermometer patent request), to send your results through immediately.

Maybe NHS Direct is ahead of it's time. When I speak to Americans, they are totally envious of our NHS, including NHS Direct. The thought of phoning a service that provides medical assurance (I would imagine this covers half the calls - and keeps the people who just want reassurance out of A&E) and advice - all without providing a credit card, is alien to most countries around the World.

I for one, will be sad to see it go.


 
tags:
NHS, economy, future, healthcare, holiday, patents, politics, travel,
3 Comments

Phone charges - a fundamental reassessment

Jul 2, 2010 at 6:21pm
 

Phone_charges

I've just returned from a successful off-site conference at a hotel in Hertfordshire.

There was absolutely no phone coverage in the hotel, and we had to walk 50m away from the building before starting to pick up a signal. It's a mixed blessing when you don't get coverage at an offsite event.

In a good way, at least everyone is focussing on the event - less phone and email distractions. However life is never this simple, and with a number of project deadlines, several of us had to keep running outside the hotel to keep checking voicemails and making a few calls.

What annoyed us though was the prices of using the hotel wireless (£15 a day, per person) and the room telephone. £2.25 for free calls - local calls at £1.25 - see the photo above. I was on the phone for a couple of hours each day - so I'd have ended up with a phone bill of over £450 for 3 days.

I dread to think what the prices were like before the fundamental reassessment! 

 


 
tags:
Hotels, telephone, travel,
0 Comments

Review of HotelMap.com

Mar 18, 2010 at 9:42am
 
via hotelmap.com

Here’s a site that uses a neat mapping tool, probably the best one I’ve seen for a while:
www.hotelmap.com

Unfortunately it’s limited to central London at the moment, but the reason I like the site:

  1. It’s very easy to use – setting up a ‘new’ map takes a minute 
  2. The end user navigation is excellent – I set a map up for our London office (http://www.hotelmap.com/hotelmap/?pro=M7LUT) and it’s really easy to use – with all the various ‘panels’ around the screen. 
  3. The design is nice – I don’t know who did the mapping (it doesn’t look like Bing or Google). 
  4. The concept is pretty neat, of creating a map based on a central location (like the Endava office, or say, Madame Tussaud’s).

Things that they need to work on:

  1. The prices don't seem particularly great!
  2. The speed of retrieving the costs need to be quicker.

 
tags:
Hotels, site review, travel,
2 Comments

Email Away

Feb 5, 2010 at 5:27pm
 

I've just came back from a business trip to Cluj in Romania where our development and test teams are located. Whilst away, two very unrelated things struck me:

The first was the mild interest in how a city in Romania can become such a centre of excellence in the technology field, which in turn can build an airport and fill WizzAir flights to their brim every day of the week. The airport was busy even at some unearthly hour this morning with English, American and many European languages. The airport has expanded considerably in the last 12 months due to the amount of business going on in the city. Judging by the destinations of the flights from Luton airport each morning, this seems to be happening all over Europe.

The second point, and I did warn that this was unrelated, was how I mainly switched to using my phone for email - not exactly unusual you might think - isn't this a common practice? Exactly, so why did none of the email newsletters that I subscribe to, render on my phone? All of the emails thought that my email client was capable of rendering an HTML version of the newsletter, so my Nokia was showing all kinds of markup, and the content was illegible. Maybe this was made worse because my phone will only collect the first few kb of each email. I don't particularly care... it shouldn't be something I need to think about.

It probably feels like a step backwards to produce text based emails, but considering the amount of people who use BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) and similar phones  for both work and personal communication nowadays, isn't it obvious?


 
tags:
Cluj, Luton airport, Romania, email, travel,
2 Comments
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Bradley Howard

Bradley Howard

Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.

 

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