Does your WordPress website go over a cliff in July 2018?

February 28, 2018March 5, 2018ianwaring Digital Ocean, Future Trends, Google, Internet, Linux, Mobiles, MySQL, Privacy Leave a comment

Secure connections, faster web sites, better Google search rankings – and well before Google throw a switch that will disadvantage many other web sites in July 2018. I describe the process to achieve this for anyone running a WordPress Multisite Network below. Or I can do this for you.

Many web sites that handle financial transactions use a secure connection; this gives a level of guarantee that you are posting your personal or credit card details directly to a genuine company. But these “HTTPS” connections don’t just protect user data, but also ensure that the user is really connecting to the right site and not an imposter one. This is important because setting up a fake version of a website users normally trust is a favourite tactic of hackers and malicious actors. HTTPS also ensures that a malicious third party can’t hijack the connection and insert malware or censor information.

Back in 2014, Google asked web site owners if they could make their sites use HTTPS connections all the time, and provided both a carrot and a stick as incentives. On the one hand, they promised that future versions of their Chrome Browser would explicitly call out sites that were presenting insecure pages, so that users knew where to tread very carefully. On the upside, they suggested that they would positively discriminate secure sites over insecure ones in future Google searches.

The final step in this process comes in July 2018:

The logistics of achieving “HTTPS” connections for many sites is far from straight forward. Like many service providers, I host a WordPress network, that aims individual customer domain names at a single Linux based server. That in turn looks to see which domain name the inbound connection request has come from, and redirects onto that website customers own subdirectory structure for the page content, formatting and images.

The main gotcha is that if I tell my server that its certified identity is “www.software-enabled.com”, an inbound request from “www.ianwaring.com”, or “www.obesemanrowing.org.uk”, will get very confused. It will look like someone has hijacked the sites, and the users browser session will gain some very pointed warnings suggesting a malicious traffic subversion attempt.

A second gotcha – even if you solve the certified identity problem – is that a lot of the content of a typical web site contains HTTP (not HTTPS) links to other pages, pictures or video stored within the same site. It would normally be a considerable (and error prone) process to change http: to https: links on all pages, not least as the pages themselves for all the different customer sites are stored by WordPress inside a complex MySQL database.

What to do?

It took quite a bit of research, but cracked it in the end. The process I used was:

Set up each customer domain name on the free tier of the CloudFlare content delivery network. This replicates local copies of the web sites static pages in locations around the world, each closer to the user than the web site itself.
Change the customer domain name’s Name Servers to the two cited by CloudFlare in step (1). It may take several hours for this change to propagate around the Internet, but no harm continuing these steps.
Repeat (1) and (2) for each site on the hosted WordPress network.
Select the WordPress “Network Admin” dashboard, and install two plug-ins; iControlWP’s “CloudFlare Flexible SSL”, and then WebAware’s “SSL Insecure Content Fixer”. The former handles the connections to the CloudFlare network (ensuring routing works without unexpected redirect loops); the latter changes http: to https: connections on the fly for references to content within each individual customer website. Network Enable both plugins. There is no need to install the separate CloudFlare WordPress plugin.
Once CloudFlare’s web site shows all the domain names as verified that they are being managed by CloudFlare’s own name servers with their own certificates assigned (they will get a warning or a tick against each), step through the “Crypto” screen on each one in turn – switching on “Always use https” redirections.

At this point, whether users access the websites using http: or https: (or don’t mention either), each will come up with a padlocked, secure, often greened address bar with “https:” in front of the web address of the site. Job done.

Once the HTTP redirects to HTTPS appear to be working, and all the content is being displayed correctly on pages, I go down the Crypto settings on the CloudFlare web site and enable “opportunistic encryption” and “HTTPS rewrites”.

In the knowledge that Google also give faster sites better rankings in search results over slow ones, there is also a “Speed” section in the CloudFlare web site. On this, i’ve told it to compress CSS, JavaScript and HTML pages – termed “Auto Minify” – to minimise the amount of data transmitted to the users browser but to still render it correctly. This, in combination with my use of a plug-in to use Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) shortcuts – which in turn can give 3x load speed improvements on mobile phones – all the customer sites are really flying.

CloudFlare do have a paid offering called “Argo Smart Routing” that further speeds up delivery of web site content. Folks are shown to be paying $5/month and seeing page loads in 35% of the time prior to this being enabled. You do start paying for the amount of traffic you’re releasing into the Internet at large, but the pricing tiers are very generous – and should only be noticeable for high traffic web sites.

So, secure connections, faster web sites, better Google search rankings – and well before Google throw the switch that will disadvantage many other web sites in July 2018. I suspect having hundreds of machines serving the content on CloudFlare’s Content Delivery Network will also make the site more resilient to distributed denial of service flood attack attempts, if any site I hosted ever got very popular. But I digress.

If you would like me to do this for you on your WordPress site(s), please get in touch here.

WTF – Tim O’Reilly – Lightbulbs On!

November 15, 2017ianwaring Amazon, Books, Enterprise IT, Facebook, Future Trends, Google, Intellectual Property, Internet, Journalism, Maker Movement, Management, Marketing, Metrics, Money, Patents, Politicians, Privacy, Robots, Shares, Software, Twitter, VCs Leave a comment

Best Read of the Year, not just for high technology, but for a reasoned meaning behind political events over the last two years, both in the UK and the USA. I can relate it straight back to some of the prescient statements made by Jeff Bezos about Amazon “Day 1” disciplines: the best defence against an organisations path to oblivion being:

customer obsession
a skeptical view of proxies
the eager adoption of external trends, and
high-velocity decision making

Things go off course when interests divide in a zero-sum way between different customer groups that you serve, and where proxies indicating “success” diverge from a clearly defined “desired outcome”.

The normal path is to start with your “customer” and give an analogue of what indicates “success” for them in what you do; a clear understanding of the desired outcome. Then the measures to track progress toward that goal, the path you follow to get there (adjusting as you go), and a frequent review that steps still serve the intended objective.

Fake News on Social Media, Finance Industry Meltdowns, unfettered slavery to “the market” and to “shareholder value” have all been central to recent political events in both the UK and the USA. Politicians of all colours were complicit in letting proxies for “success” dissociate fair balance of both wealth and future prospects from a vast majority of the customers they were elected to serve. In the face of that, the electorate in the UK bit back – as they did for Trump in the US too.

Part 3 of the book, entitled “A World Ruled by Algorithms” – pages 153-252 – is brilliant writing on our current state and injustices. Part 4 (pages 255-350) entitled “It’s up to us” maps a path to brighter times for us and our descendants.

Tim says:

The barriers to fresh thinking are even higher in politics than in business. The Overton Window, a term introduced by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, says that an ideas political viability falls within a window framing a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. There are ideas that a politician simply cannot recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.

In the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump didn’t just push the Overton Window far too to right, he shattered it, making statement after statement that would have been disqualifying for any previous candidate. Fortunately, once the window has come unstuck, it is possible to move it radically new directions.

He then says that when such things happen, as they did at the time of the Great Depression, the scene is set to do radical things to change course for the ultimate greater good. So, things may well get better the other side of Trumps outrageous pandering to the excesses of the right, and indeed after we see the result of our electorates division over BRexit played out in the next 18 months.

One final thing that struck me was how one political “hot potato” issue involving Uber in Taiwan got very divided and extreme opinions split 50/50 – but nevertheless got reconciled to everyone’s satisfaction in the end. This using a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a piece of software called “Pol.is”. This allows folks to publish assertions, vote and see how the filter bubbles evolve through many iterations over a 4 week period. “I think Passenger Liability Insurance should be mandatory for riders on UberX private vehicles” (heavy split votes, 33% both ends of the spectrum) evolved to 95% agreeing with “The Government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control system, so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber”. The licensing authority in Taipei duly followed up for the citizens and all sides of that industry.

I wonder what the BRexit “demand on parliament” would have looked like if we’d followed that process, and if indeed any of our politicians could have encapsulated the benefits to us all on either side of that question. I suspect we’d have a much clearer picture than we do right now.

In summary, a superb book. Highly recommended.

IT Trends into 2017 – or the delusions of Ian Waring

December 27, 2016December 31, 2016ianwaring Amazon, Cloud, Digital Ocean, Future Trends, Google, Internet, Linux, Management, Metrics, Microsoft, Mobiles, Open Source, Software, Wardley Maps Leave a comment

My perception is as follows. I’m also happy to be told I’m mad, or delusional, or both – but here goes. Most reflect changes well past the industry move from CapEx led investments to Opex subscriptions of several years past, and indeed the wholesale growth in use of Open Source Software across the industry over the last 10 years. Your own Mileage, or that of your Organisation, May Vary:

if anyone says the words “private cloud”, run for the hills. Or make them watch https://youtu.be/URvWSsAgtJE. There is also an equivalent showing how to build a toaster for $15,000. The economics of being in the business of building your own datacentre infrastructure is now an economic fallacy. My last months Amazon AWS bill (where I’ve been developing code – and have a one page site saying what the result will look like) was for 3p. My Digital Ocean server instance (that runs a network of WordPress sites) with 30GB flash storage and more bandwidth than I can shake a stick at, plus backups, is $24/month. Apart from that, all I have is subscriptions to Microsoft, Github and Google for various point services.
Most large IT vendors have approached cloud vendors as “sell to”, and sacrificed their own future by not mapping customer landscapes properly. That’s why OpenStack is painting itself into a small corner of the future market – aimed at enterprises that run their own data centres and pay support costs on a per software instance basis. That’s Banking, Finance and Telco land. Everyone else is on (or headed to) the public cloud, for both economic reasons and “where the experts to manage infrastructure and it’s security live” at scale.
The War stage of Infrastructure cloud is over. Network effects are consolidating around a small number of large players (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) and more niche players with scale (Digital Ocean among SME developers, Softlayer in IBM customers of old, Heroku with Salesforce, probably a few hosting providers).
Industry move to scale out open source, NoSQL (key:value document orientated) databases, and components folks can wire together. Having been brought up on MySQL, it was surprisingly easy to set up a MongoDB cluster with shards (to spread the read load, scaled out based on index key ranges) and to have slave replicas backing data up on the fly across a wide area network. For wiring up discrete cloud services, the ground is still rough in places (I spent a couple of months trying to get an authentication/login workflow working between a single page JavaScript web app, Amazon Cognito and IAM). As is the case across the cloud industry, the documentation struggles to keep up with the speed of change; developers have to be happy to routinely dip into Github to see how to make things work.
There is a lot of focus on using Containers as a delivery mechanism for scale out infrastructure, and management tools to orchestrate their environment. Go, Chef, Jenkins, Kubernetes, none of which I have operational experience with (as I’m building new apps have less dependencies on legacy code and data than most). Continuous Integration and DevOps often cited in environments were custom code needs to be deployed, with Slack as the ultimate communications tool to warn of regular incoming updates. Having been at one startup for a while, it often reminded me of the sort of military infantry call of “incoming!” from the DevOps team.
There are some laudable efforts to abstract code to be able to run on multiple cloud providers. FOG in the Ruby ecosystem. CloudFoundry (termed BlueMix in IBM) is executing particularly well in large Enterprises with investments in Java code. Amazon are trying pretty hard to make their partners use functionality only available on AWS, in traditional lock-in strategy (to avoid their services becoming a price led commodity).
The bleeding edge is currently “Function as a Service”, “Backend as a Service” or “Serverless apps” typified with Amazon Lambda. There are actually two different entities in the mix; one to provide code and to pay per invocation against external events, the other to be able to scale (or contract) a service in real time as demand flexes. You abstract all knowledge of the environment away.
Google, Azure and to a lesser extent AWS are packaging up API calls for various core services and machine learning facilities. Eg: I can call Google’s Vision API with a JPEG image file, and it can give me the location of every face (top of nose) on the picture, face bounds, whether each is smiling or not). Another that can describe what’s in the picture. There’s also a link into machine learning training to say “does this picture show a cookie” or “extract the invoice number off this image of a picture of an invoice”. There is an excellent 35 minute discussion on the evolving API landscape (including the 8 stages of API lifecycle, the need for honeypots to offset an emergent security threat and an insight to one impressive Uber API) on a recent edition of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast: see http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GcpPodcast/~3/LiXCEub0LFo/
Microsoft and Google (with PowerApps and App Maker respectively) trying to remove the queue of IT requests for small custom business apps based on company data. Though so far, only on internal intranet type apps, not exposed outside the organisation). This is also an antithesis of the desire for “big data”, which is really the domain of folks with massive data sets and the emergent “Internet of Things” sensor networks – where cloud vendor efforts on machine learning APIs can provide real business value. But for a lot of commercial organisations, getting data consolidated into a “single version of the truth” and accessible to the folks who need it day to day is where PowerApps and AppMaker can really help.
Mobile apps are currently dogged by “winner take all” app stores, with a typical user using 5 apps for almost all of their mobile activity. With new enhancements added by all the major browser manufacturers, web components will finally come to the fore for mobile app delivery (not least as they have all the benefits of the web and all of those of mobile apps – off a single code base). Look to hear a lot more about Polymer in the coming months (which I’m using for my own app in conjunction with Google Firebase – to develop a compelling Progressive Web app). For an introduction, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBbejeKHrjg
Overall, the thing most large vendors and SIs have missed is to map their customer needs against available project components. To map user needs against axes of product life cycle and value chains – and to suss the likely movement of components (which also tells you where to apply six sigma and where agile techniques within the same organisation). But more eloquently explained by Simon Wardley: https://youtu.be/Ty6pOVEc3bA

There are quite a range of “end of 2016” of surveys I’ve seen that reflect quite a few of these trends, albeit from different perspectives (even one that mentioned the end of Java as a legacy language). You can also add overlays with security challenges and trends. But – what have I missed, or what have I got wrong? I’d love to know your views.

Hooked, health markets but the mind is wandering… to pooh and data privacy

February 1, 2015February 1, 2015ianwaring Apple, Diet, Fitness, Future Trends, Health, Internet, Medical, Mobiles, Pebble, Politicians, Software, VCs, Watches Leave a comment

One of the things I learnt many years ago was that there were four fundamental basics to increasing profits in any business. You sell:

More Products (or Services)
to More People
More Often
At higher unit profit (which is higher price, lower cost, or both)

and with that, four simple Tableau graphs against a timeline could expose the business fundamentals explaining good growth, or the core reason for declining revenue. It could also expose early warning signs, where a small number of large transactions hid an evolving surprise – like the volume of buying customers trending relentlessly down, while the revenue numbers appeared to be flying okay.

Another dimension is that a Brand equates to trust, and that consistency and predictability of the product or service plays a big part to retain that trust.

Later on, a more controversial view was that there were two fundamental business models for any business; that of a healer or a dealer. One sells an effective one-shot fix to a customer need, while the other survives by engineering a customers dependency to keep on returning.

With that, I sometimes agonise on what the future of health services delivery is. One the one hand, politicians verbal jousts over funding and trying to punt services over to private enterprise. In several cases to providers of services following the economic rent (dealer) model found in the American market, which, at face value, has a business model needing per capita expense that no sane person would want to replicate compared to the efficiency we have already. On the other hand, a realisation that the market is subject to radical disruption, through a combination of:

An ever better informed, educated customer base
A realisation that just being overweight is a root cause of many adverse trends
Genomics
Microbiome Analysis
The upcoming ubiquity of sensors that can monitor all our vitals

With that, i’ve started to read “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, which is all about the psychology of engineering habit forming products (and services). The thing in the back of my mind is how to encourage the owner (like me) of a smart watch, fitness device or glucose monitor to fundamentally remove my need to enter my food intake every day – a habit i’ve maintained for 12.5 years so far.

The primary challenge is that, for most people, there is little newsworthy data that comes out of this exercise most of the time. The habit would be difficult to reinforce without useful news or actionable data. Some of the current gadget vendors are trying to encourage use by encouraging steps competition league tables you can have with family and friends (i’ve done this with relatives in West London, Southampton, Tucson Arizona and Melbourne Australia; that challenge finished after a week and has yet to be repeated).

My mind started to wander back to the challenge of disrupting the health market, and how a watch could form a part. Could its sensors measure my fat, protein and carb intake (which is the end result of my food diary data collection, along with weekly weight measures)? Could I build a service that would be a data asset to help disrupt health service delivery? How do I suss Microbiome changes – which normally requires analysis of a stool samples??

With that, I start to think i’m analysing this the wrong way around. I remember an analysis some time back when a researcher assessed the extent drug (mis)use in specific neighbourhoods by monitoring the make-up of chemical flows in networks of sewers. So, rather than put sensors on people’s wrists (and only see a subset of data), is there a place for technology in sewer pipes instead? If Microbiomes and the Genetic makeup of our output survives relatively intact, then sampling at strategic points of the distribution network would give us a pretty good dataset. Not least as DNA sequencing could allow the original owner (source) of output to connect back to any pearls of wisdom that could be analysed or inferred from their contributions, even if the drop-off points happened at home, work or elsewhere.

Hmmm. Water companies and Big Data.

Think i’ll park that and get on with the book.

Another lucid flurry of Apple thinking it through – unlike everyone else

September 15, 2014September 15, 2014ianwaring Apple, Cloud, Facebook, Fitness, Future Trends, Google, Internet, Low Energy Bluetooth, Medical, Money, Samsung, Twitter, Watches Leave a comment

This happens every time Apple announce a new product category. Audience reaction, and the press, rush off to praise or condemn the new product without standing back and joining the dots. The Kevin Lynch presentation at the Keynote also didn’t have a precursor of a short video on-ramp to help people understand the full impact of what they were being told. With that, the full impact is a little hidden. It’s a lot more than having Facebook, Twitter, Email and notifications on your wrist when you have your phone handset in your pocket.

There were a lot of folks focussing on it’s looks and comparisons to the likely future of the Swiss watch industry. For me, the most balanced summary of the luxury esthetics from someone who’s immersed in that industry can be found at: http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/hodinkee-apple-watch-review

Having re-watched the keynote, and seen all the lame Androidware, Samsung, LG and Moto 360 comparisons, there are three examples that explode almost all of the “meh” reactions in my view. The story is hidden my what’s on that S1 circuit board inside the watch, and the limited number of admissions of what it can already do. Three scenarios:

1. Returning home at the end of a working day (a lot of people do this).

First thing I do after I come indoors is to place my mobile phone on top of the cookery books in our kitchen. Then for the next few hours i’m usually elsewhere in the house or in the garden. Talking around, that behaviour is typical. Not least as it happens in the office too, where if i’m in a meeting, i’d normally leave my handset on silent on my desk.

With every Android or Tizen Smart Watch I know, the watch loses the connection as soon as I go out of Bluetooth range – around 6-10 meters away from the handset. That smart watch is a timepiece from that point on.

Now, who forgot to notice that the Apple Watch has got b/g WiFi integrated on their S1 module? Or that it it can not only tell me of an incoming call, but allow me to answer it, listen and talk – and indeed to hand control back to my phone handset when I return to it’s current proximity?

2. Sensors

There are a plethora of Low Energy Bluetooth sensors around – and being introduced with great regularity – for virtually every bodily function you can think of. Besides putting your own fitness tracking sensors on at home, there are probably many more that can be used in a hospital setting. With that, a person could be quite a walking network of sensors and wander to different wards or labs during their day, or indeed even be released to recuperate at home.

Apple already has some sensors (heart rate, and probably some more capabilities to be announced in time, using the infrared related ones on the skin side of the Apple watch), but can act as a hub to any collection of external bluetooth sensors at the same time. Or in smart pills you can swallow. Low Energy Bluetooth is already there on the Apple Watch. That, in combination with the processing power, storage and b/g WiFi makes the watch a complete devices hub, virtually out of the box.

If your iPhone is on the same WiFi, everything syncs up with the Health app there and the iCloud based database already – which you can (at your option) permit an external third party to have access to. Now, tell me about the equivalent on any other device or service you can think of.

3. Paying for things.

The iPhone 5S, 6 and 6 Plus all have integrated finger print scanners. Apple have put some functionality into iOS 8 where, if you’re within Bluetooth range (6-10 meters of your handset), you can authenticate (with your fingerprint) the fact your watch is already on your wrist. If the sensors on the back have any suspicion that the watch leaves your wrist, it immediately invalidates the authentication.

So, walk up to a contactless till, see the payment amount appear on the watch display, one press of the watch pays the bill. Done. Now try to do that with any other device you know.

Developers, developers, developers.

There are probably a million other applications that developers will think of, once folks realise there is a full UNIX computer on that SoC (System on a Chip). With WiFi. With Bluetooth. With a Taptic feedback mechanism that feels like someone is tapping your wrist (not loudly vibrating across the table, or flashing LED lights at you). With a GPU driving a high quality, touch sensitive display. Able to not only act as a remote control for your iTunes music collection on another device, but to play it locally when untethered too (you can always add bluetooth earbuds to keep your listening private). I suspect some of the capabilities Apple have shown (like the ability to stream your heartbeat to another Apple Watch user) will evolve into potential remote health visit applications that can work Internet wide.

Meanwhile, the tech press and the discussion boards are full of people lamenting the fact that there is no GPS sensor in the watch itself (like every other Smart Watch I should add – GPS location sensing is something that eats battery power for breakfast; better to rely on what’s in the phone handset, or to wear a dedicated bluetooth GPS band on the other wrist if you really need it).

Don’t be distracted; with the electronics already in the device, the Apple Watch is truly only the beginning. We’re now waiting for the full details of the WatchKit APIs to unleash that ecosystem with full force.

The madness that is Hodor and Yo. Or is it?

July 21, 2014ianwaring Facebook, Future Trends, HomeKit, Internet, Mailchimp, Mobiles, Software, Twitter Leave a comment

One constant source of bemusement – well, really horror – is the inefficiency of social media to deliver a message to it’s intended recipients. In any company setting, saying “I didn’t receive your message” is the management equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” excuse at school; it is considered a very rare occurrence and the excuse a poor attempt to seek forgiveness.

Sending bulk (but personalised) email to a long list of people who know you is just the start. Routinely, 30% of what you send will end up finishing short of your destination; no matter how many campaigns i’ve seen from anyone, none get higher than 70% delivery to the intended recipients. In practice, the number routinely read by the recipient normally bests at 20-30% of the number sent. Spam filters often over-zealous too. With practice, you get to find out that sending email to arrive in the recipients in-tray at 3:00pm on a Thursday afternoon local time is 7x more likely to be read than the same one sent at 6:00am on a Sunday morning. And that mentioning the recipients name, an indication of what it’s about and what they’ll see when the email is opened – all hooked together in the subject line -vastly improves open rates. But most people are still facing 70-80% wastage rates. I’ve done some work on this, but that experience is available to my consulting clients!

So, thank god for Facebook. Except that the visibility of status updates routinely only gets seen by 16% of your friends on average (the range is 2%-47% depending on all sorts of factors, but 16% is the average). The two ways to improve this is to make your own list that others can subscribe to, and if they remember to access that list name, then they’ll see the works. But few remember to do this. The other method is to pay Facebook for delivery, where you can push your update (or invite to an interest list, aka ‘likes’) to a defined set of demographics in specific geographic areas. But few guarantees that you’ll get >50% viewership even then.

So, thank god for Twitter. Except the chance of some of your followers actually seeing your tweets drops into the sub-1% range; the norm is that you’ll need to be watching your stream as the update is posted. So you’re down to using something like Tweetdeck to follow individual people in their own column, or a specific hashtag in another. You very quickly run out of screen real estate to see everything you actually want to see. This is a particular frustration to me, as I quite often find myself in the middle of a Tweet storm (where a notable person, like @pmarca – Marc Andreessen – will routinely run off 8-12 numbered tweets); the end result is like listening to a group of experts discussing interesting things around a virtual water cooler, and that is fascinating to be part of. The main gotcha is that I get to see his stuff early on a Saturday morning in the UK only because he tweets before folks on the west coast of the USA are headed to bed – otherwise i’d never catch it.

Some of the modern messaging apps (like SnapChat) at least tell you when that picture has been received and read by the recipient(s) you sent it too – and duly deleted on sight. But we’re well short of an application where you can intelligently follow Twitter scale dialogues reliably for people you really want to follow. Twitter themselves just appear happy to keep suggesting all sorts of people for me to follow, probably unconscious that routine acceptance would do little other than further polluting my stream with useless trash.

Parking all this, I saw one company produce a spoof Android custom keyboard, where the only key provided just says “Hodor”. Or if you press it down for longer, it gives you “Hodor” in bold. You can probably imagine the content of the reviews of it on the Google Play Store (mainly long missives that just keep repeating the word).

Then the next madness. Someone writing an application that just lists your friends names, and if you press their name, it just sends through a message to them saying “Yo!”.

Just like the Facebook Pokes of old. A team of three programmers wrote it in a couple of days, and it’s already been downloaded many thousands of times from the Apple App Store. It did sound to me like a modern variation of the Budweiser “Whats Up” habit a few years back, so I largely shook my head and carried on with other work.

The disbelief set in when I found out that this app had been subject to a $1.5 million VC funding round, which valued the company (this is their only “significant” app) at a $10m valuation. Then found out one of the lead investors was none other than a very respected John Borthwick (who runs Betaworks, an application Studio housed in the old Meat Packing area of New York).

His thing seems to be that this application ushers in a new world, where we quite often want to throw a yes/go-ahead/binary notification reliably to another entity. That may be a person (to say i’ve left work, or i’ve arrived at the restaurant, etc) or indeed a device (say ‘Yo’ to the coffee maker as you approach work, or to turn on the TV). So, there may indeed be some logic in the upcoming world of the “Internet of Things”, hyped to death as it may be.

John’s announcement of his funding can be found here. The challenge will no doubt be to see whether his investment is as prescient as many of his other ones (IFTTT, Bit.ly, Dots, Digg Deeper, etc) have been to date. In the meantime, back to code my own app – which is slightly more ambitious than that now famous one.

Paid Queue Jumping, San Francisco Style

July 6, 2014July 6, 2014ianwaring Future Trends, Internet, Mobiles, Pricing, Selling, Software Leave a comment

There’s a fair amount of controversy about two mobile applications in San Francisco right now; MonkeyParking and ReservationHop. Both offer a twist on selling a place in a queue to a limited resource:

In an environment where it can sometimes take 45 minutes to find a car parking place, MonkeyParking enables someone currently occupying a space to sell this to another driver in the same proximity.
Likewise, where Restaurants having waiting lists that may extend to over a month, ReservationHop prebooks tables and sells these to customers who want to make a late booking

Transport authorities are objecting to the scalping of public parking spaces, and likewise there is concern about unsold restaurant bookings causing inefficiences when virtual diners don’t turn into real ones.

Besides the market for ticket touts, i’m also reminded that some customers will pay a hobo (tramp) to reserve their place in queues for new iPhones. I also recall Sir John Harvey-Jones, ex CEO of ICI plc, who once vented his frustration at the management of Morgan Cars, who maintained a multi-year waiting list for cars rolling off their production line. Customers would routinely sell their positions at greater than the cost of a new car, a practice resulting in much shrugging of shoulders at a practice that they felt wasn’t really cricket – but which they allowed to carry on regardless.

I guess the answer is to charge a premium for a standard car, and to discount personal customisations ordered up front. Customising something normally increases the value to the originally intended recipient, while decreasing the value to everyone else. Anyone who doubts that hasn’t looked at the value an iPad sale achieves on eBay between stock machines and ones engraved with the owners name.

But, same old. It’s happened from the dawn of time, and rarity of any resource (and timely access to same) normally attracts some value that scalpers can attribute a price to. The only thing I find distasteful is the name coined for mobile apps that enhance this process on the West Coast of the USA right now – that of “Jerkware”. Hopefully we can come up with a more appropriate name going forward.

European Courts have been great; just one fumble to correct

July 5, 2014July 5, 2014ianwaring Google, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Police, Politicians Leave a comment

We have an outstanding parliament that works in the Public Interest. Where mobile roaming charges are being eroded into oblivion, where there is tacit support in law for the principles of Net Neutrality, and where the Minister is fully supportive of a forward looking (for consumers) Digital future. That is the European Parliament, and the excellent work of Neelie Kroes and her staff.

The one blight on the EC’s otherwise excellent work has been the decision to enact – then outsource – a “Right to be Forgotten” process to a commercial third party. The car started skidding off the road of sensibility very early in the process, albeit underpinned by one valid core assumption.

Fundamentally, there are protections in place, where a personal financial misfortune or a criminal offence in a persons formative years has occurred, to have a public disclosure time limit enshrined in law. This is to prevent undue prejudice after an agreed time, and to allow the afflicted to carry on their affairs without penalty or undue suffering after lessons have been both internalised and not repeated.

There are public data maintenance and reporting limits on some cases of data on a criminal reference database, or on financial conduct databases, that are mandated to be erased from the public record a specific number of years after first being placed there. This was the case with the Spanish Gentleman who believed his privacy was being violated by the publication of a bankruptcy asset sale well past this statutory public financial reporting boundary, in a newspaper who attributed that sale to him personally.

In my humble opinion, the resolution of the court should have been to (quietly) order the Newspaper to remove (or obfuscate) his name from that article at source. Job done; this then formally disassociated his name from the event, and all downstream (searchable) references to it likewise, so achieving the alignment of his privacy with the usual public record financial reporting acts in law.

By leaving the source in place, and merely telling search engine providers to enact processes to allow individuals to request removal of unwanted facts from the search indexes only, opens the door to a litany of undesirable consequences – and indeed leaves the original article on a newspaper web site untouched and in direct violation of the subjects right to privacy over 7 years after his bankruptcy; this association should now have no place on the public record.

Besides timescales coded into law on specific timescales where certain classes of personal data can remain on the public record, there are also ample remedies at law in place for enforcing removal (and seeking compensation for) the publication of libellous or slanderous material. Or indeed the refusal to take-down such material in a timely manner with, or without, a corresponding written apology where this is judged appropriate. No new laws needed; it is then clear that factual content has its status reinforced in history.

In the event, we’re now subject to a morass of take-down requests that have no legal basis for support. Of the initial volume (of 10’s of 1,000’s of removal requests):

31 percent of requests from the UK and Ireland related to frauds or scams
20 percent to arrests or convictions for violent or serious crimes
12 percent to child pornography arrests
5 percent to the government and police
2 percent related to celebrities

That is demonstrably not serving the public interest.

I do sincerely hope the European Justices that enacted the current process will reflect on the monster they have created, and instead change the focus to enact privacy of individuals in line with the financial and criminal record keeping edicts of publicly accessible data coded in law already. In that way, justice will be served, and we will no longer be subjected to a process outsourced to a third party who should never be put in a position of judge and jury.

That is what the courts are for, where the laws are very specific, and in which the public was full confidence.

Start with the needs of the end user, and work back from there…

June 15, 2014June 15, 2014ianwaring Amazon, Future Trends, Internet, Management, Mobiles, Politicians, Samsung, Software, Xioami Leave a comment

A bit of a random day. I learnt something about the scale of construction taking place in China; not just the factoid that they’re building 70 airports at the moment, but a much more stunning one. That, in the last 3 years, the Chinese have used more cement than the USA did in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000. The very time when all the Interstate and Road networks were built, in addition to construction in virtually every major city.

5 of the top 10 mobile phone vendors are Chinese (it’s not just an Apple vs Samsung battle now), and one appears to be breaking from the pack in emerging markets – Xiaomi (pronounced show – as in shower – and me). Their business model is to offer Apple-class high end phones at around cost, target them at 18-30 year “fans” in direct sales (normally flash sales after a several 100,000 unit production run), and to make money from ROM customisations and add-on cloud services. I’ve started hearing discussions with Silicon Valley based market watchers who are starting to cite Xiaomi’s presence in their analyses, not least as in China, they are taking market share from Samsung – the first alternative Android vendor to consistently do so. I know their handsets, and their new tablet, do look very nice and very cost effective.

That apart, I have tonight read a fantastic blog post from Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe – talking specifically about Uber and this weeks strikes by Taxi drivers in major cities across Europe. Well worth a read in full here.

Summarised:

Let me respond to the news of widespread strikes and numerous attempts to limit or ban taxi app services across Europe. The debate about taxi apps is really a debate about the wider sharing economy.
It is right that we feel sympathy for people who face big changes in their lives.
Whether it is about cabs, accommodation, music, flights, the news or whatever. The fact is that digital technology is changing many aspects of our lives. We cannot address these challenges by ignoring them, by going on strike, or by trying to ban these innovations out of existence
a strike won’t work: rather than “downing tools” what we need is a real dialogue
We also need services that are designed around consumers.
People in the sharing economy like drivers, accommodation hosts, equipment owners and artisans – these people all need to pay their taxes and play by the rules. And it’s the job of national and local authorities to make sure that happens.
But the rest of us cannot hide in a cave.
Taxis can take advantage of these new innovations in ways consumers like – they can arrive more quickly, they could serve big events better, there could be more of them, their working hours could be more flexible and suited to driver needs – and apps can help achieve that.
More generally, the job of the law is not to lie to you and tell you that everything will always be comfortable or that tomorrow will be the same as today. It won’t. Not only that, it will be worse for you and your children if we pretend we don’t have to change. If we don’t think together about how to benefit from these changes and these new technologies, we will all suffer.
If I have learnt anything from the recent European elections it is that we get nowhere in Europe by running away from hard truths. It’s time to face facts: digital innovations like taxi apps are here to stay. We need to work with them not against them.

It is absolutely refreshing to have elected representatives working for us all and who “get it”. Focus on consumers, being respectful of those afflicted by changes, but driving for the collective common good that Digital innovations provide to society. Kudos to Neelie Kroes; a focus on users, not entrenched producers – a stance i’ve only really heard with absolute clarity before from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. It does really work.

What if Quality Journalism isn’t?

June 14, 2014ianwaring Amazon, Future Trends, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Open Source, Software, Twitter Leave a comment

Carrying on with the same theme as yesterdays post – the fact that content is becoming disaggregated from a web sites home page – I read an excellent blog post today: What if Quality Journalism isn’t? In this, the author looks at the seemingly divergent claims from the New York Times, who claim:

They are “winning” at Journalism
Readership is falling, both on web and mobile platforms
therefore they need to pursue strategies to grow their audience

The author asks “If its product is ‘the world’s best journalism‘, why does it have a problem growing its audience?”. You can’t be the world’s best and fail at the same time. Indeed. And then goes into a deeper analysis.

I like the analogue of the supermarket of intent (Amazon) versus a supermarket of interest (social) versus Niche. The central issue is how to curate articles of interest to a specific subscriber, without filling their delivery with superfluous (to the reader) content. This where Newspapers (in the authors case) typically contain 70% or more of wasted content to a typical specific user.

One comment under the article suggests one approach: existence of an open source aggregation model for the municipal bond market on Twitter via #muniland… journos from 20+ pubs, think tanks, govts, law firms, market commentators hash their story and all share.

Deep linking to useful, pertinent and interesting content is probably a big potential area if alternative approaches can crack it. Until then, i’m having to rely on RSS feeds of known authors I respect, or from common watering holes, or from the occasional flash of brilliance that crosses my twitter stream at times i’m watching it.

Just need to update Aaron Swartz’s code to spot water-cooler conversations on Twitter among specific people or sources I respect. That would probably do most of the leg work to enlighten me more productively, and without subjecting myself to pages of search engine discovery.

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