Politicians

Self improvement (or the continued delusions of Ian Waring, 2020 edition)

ianwaring Books, Management, Microsoft, Politicians, Software

My Christmas holiday reading ranged from MindF*ck by Christopher Wylie to a Satya Nadella recommendation: Mindset by Dr Carol S Dweck. Wylie’s book is A1, and all the lessons of December 12th (the latest UK General Election) are there. The antidotes are much more wide ranging.

The latter one was one of those books where I think the pieces I need to remember will fit on less than a sheet of A4.

Most of the book was contrasting the difference between “Fixed Mindset” and “Growth Mindset”. However, look under the surface, the main points are:

  • Blame is for losers
  • Prima Donnas “anyone’s fault but mine” are an example of this, not good for team cohesion
  • People with a growth mindset appear to be relentlessly curious and ask questions to understand patterns, not just learn by rote memory
  • A repeat of the old Arnold Palmer Golf Adage; “the more I practice, the luckier I get”
  • Be humble
  • “A managers pick A employees, B managers pick C employees”.
  • Also struck in my past that the best managers don’t issue edicts, but ask lots of questions – and trust the skills of their employees – instead

I recall one 23-year old VP at British Telecom; whenever confronted with a new service, the immediate question was “What is the business model?” and he was straight under the surface to understand how things work.

The other was a personal experience in May 1983, when none other than Bill Gates visited Digital Equipment (where I worked) to show us a new system Microsoft were building called “Windows”. There were 14 of us sitting around a conference table waiting for the senior folks to escape a board meeting – and Gates sitting there with a Compaq+ PC and a two button mouse. Curiousity got the better of me, so I said “Tell me. The Apple Lisa has a one button mouse, and Visi-On (a Windowing system being developed by the authors of Visicalc) has three. I notice your mouse has two buttons. Why?”.

He duly went off for a good few minutes describing how all the competitor products interacted with different third party applications, and the problems each resulted in. Very deep, really thoroughly thought through. The senior folks duly arrived, and frustrated him with a lack of commitment to using MS-DOS on our PCs, Windows or not.

I was told afterwards that he told the salesguy who brought him in: “There was only one guy in the room who knew what he was talking about. Hire him”. I interviewed with Scott Oki (VP International at Microsoft at the time) and David Fraser (UK MD), but elected not to take the role. Many years later, I took Paul Maritz – then CEO of VMware, but previously VP of Windows at Microsoft) to see my CEO (Mike Norris of Computacenter; while waiting for our slot, I asked him where Scott Oki was these days. Answer – he owns several golf courses on the West Coast of the USA 🙂

The main thing I always reflect on is in situations when i’m interviewing job role applicants. There’s always this situation at the end when the candidate is asked “Do you have any other questions for me/us?”. While there are a few attitude qualification questions – plus some evidence that they set their own performance standards – that final question is almost always the most important qualifier of all. Demonstrate humility and curiosity, then you’re the one I want to work with, and improve together.

Quality Journalism – UK Oxymoron?

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I’m writing this the day that John McCain died in the USA – and the most compelling eulogy came from Barack Obama. It’s a rare day right now when people can disagree fervently with each others views, but still hold each other in greatest respect.

In reading “The Secret Barrister”, you come away with a data filled summary of the comparatively and continued poor state of Westminster politics. Of successive abuses to a system of justice by politicians of all colours. To prioritise “PR” on everything to mask poor financial choices with sound bites, while quietly robbing us all blind of values we hold dear. And i’m sure Chris Grayling will receive few Christmas Cards from members of the judiciary based on their experience of him documented in this books pages.

Politics is but only half the story in this. I often muse to wonder where quality journalism disappeared to? There are good pockets in the London Review of Books, and with the work on the Panama Papers by ICIJ – but where else are the catalogue of abuses systematically documented in a data based, consumable way? Where is the media with the same bite as “World in Action” back on the day? It appears completely AWOL.

One of the really curious things about Westminster is that MPs are required to align to the terms of the “The Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament“. If you go down to item 6, it reads “Members have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents”. Now, tell me how the Whip system works there. On the face of it, it is profoundly against the very code in which our democracy is enshrined.

There appears to be no data source published on the number of votes taken, and whether they were “free” votes or directed to be 1, 2 or 3 line instructions from each whips office. Fundamentally, how many votes taken were allowed to rest on the conscious obligations to be exercised by MPs freely, or to what extent were they compelled like sheep through the abattoir voting booths there?

My gut suggests our current government are probably inflicting more divisive whips more often than any UK government in our history, not least as the future interests of our country appear to being driven by a very small proportion of representatives there. The bare complexion of this should be easily apparent from the numbers and some simple comparative graphs – so, who’s keeping count?

Democracy this isn’t. And the lack of quality journalism in the UK is heavily complicit in it’s disappearance.

WTF – Tim O’Reilly – Lightbulbs On!

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What's the Future - Tim O'Reilly

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:

  1. customer obsession
  2. a skeptical view of proxies
  3. the eager adoption of external trends, and
  4. 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.

Reinventing Healthcare

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Comparison of US and UK healthcare costs per capita

A lot of the political effort in the UK appears to circle around a government justifying and handing off parts of our NHS delivery assets to private enterprises, despite the ultimate model (that of the USA healthcare industry) costing significantly more per capita. Outside of politicians lining their own pockets in the future, it would be easy to conclude that few would benefit by such changes; such moves appear to be both economically farcical and firmly against the public interest. I’ve not yet heard any articulation of a view that indicates otherwise. But less well discussed are the changes that are coming, and where the NHS is uniquely positioned to pivot into the future.

There is significant work to capture DNA of individuals, but these are fairly static over time. It is estimated that there are 10^9 data points per individual, but there are many other data points – which change against a long timeline – that could be even more significant in helping to diagnose unwanted conditions in a timely fashion. To flip the industry to work almost exclusively to preventative and away from symptom based healthcare.

I think I was on the right track with an interest in Microbiome testing services. The gotcha is that commercial services like uBiome, and public research like the American (and British) Gut Project, are one-shot affairs. Taking a stool, skin or other location sample takes circa 6,000 hours of CPU wall time to reconstruct the 16S rRNA gene sequences of a statistically valid population profile. Something I thought I could get to a super fast turnaround using excess capacity (spot instances – excess compute power you can bid to consume when available) at one or more of the large cloud vendors. And then to build a data asset that could use machine learning techniques to spot patterns in people who later get afflicted by an undesirable or life threatening medical condition.

The primary weakness in the plan is that you can’t suss the way a train is travelling by examining a photograph taken looking down at a static railway line. You need to keep the source sample data (not just a summary) and measure at regular intervals; an incidence of salmonella can routinely knock out 30% of your Microbiome population inside 3 days before it recovers. The profile also flexes wildly based on what you eat and other physiological factors.

The other weakness is that your DNA and your Microbiome samples are not the full story. There are many other potential leading indicators that could determine your propensity to become ill that we’re not even sampling. The questions of which of our 10^18 different data points are significant over time, and how regularly we should be sampled, are open questions

Experience in the USA is that in environments where regular preventative checkups of otherwise healthy individuals take place – that of Dentists – have managed to lower the cost of service delivery by 10% at a time where the rest of the health industry have seen 30-40% cost increases.

So, what are the measures that should be taken, how regularly and how can we keep the source data in a way that allows researchers to employ machine learning techniques to expose the patterns toward future ill-health? There was a good discussion this week on the A16Z Podcast on this very subject with Jeffrey Kaditz of Q Bio. If you have a spare 30 minutes, I thoroughly recommend a listen: https://soundcloud.com/a16z/health-data-feedback-loop-q-bio-kaditz.

That said, my own savings are such that I have to refocus my own efforts elsewhere back in the IT industry, and my MicroBiome testing service Business Plan mothballed. The technology to regularly sample a big enough population regularly is not yet deployable in a cost effective fashion, but will come. When it does, the NHS will be uniquely positioned to pivot into the sampling and preventative future of healthcare unhindered.

Politicians and the NHS: the missing question

ianwaring Health, Journalism, Management, Medical, Metrics, Politicians

 

The inevitable electioneering has begun, with all the political soundbites simplified into headline spend on the NHS. That is probably the most gross injustice of all.

This is an industry lined up for the most fundamental seeds of change. Genomics, Microbiomes, ubiquitous connected sensors and quite a realisation that the human body is already the most sophisticated of survival machines. There is also the realisation that weight and overeating are a root cause of downstream problems, with a food industry getting a free ride to pump unsuitable chemicals into the food chain without suffering financial consequences for the damage caused. Especially at the “low cost” end of the dietary spectrum.

Politicians, pharma and food lobbyists are not our friends. In the final analysis, we’re all being handed a disservice because those leading us are not asking the fundamental question about health service delivery, and to work back from there.

That question is: “What business are we in?”.

As a starter for 10, I recommend this excellent post on Medium: here.

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

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Hooked by Nir Eyal

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.

Ians Brain goes all Economics on him

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A couple of unconnected events in the last week. One was an article by Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame, with some observations about how Silicon Valley was really one big Psychological Experiment (see his blog post: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_pivot/).

It’s a further extension on a comment I once read by Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB, reflecting on how Salespeoples compensation works – very much like paying in lottery tickets: http://maxschireson.com/2013/02/02/sales-compensation-and-lottery-tickets/.

The main connection being that Salespeople tend to get paid in lottery tickets in Max’s case, whereas Scott thinks the same is an industry-wide phenomenon – for hundreds of startup companies in one part of California just south of San Francisco. Both hence disputing a central ethos of the American Dream – that he who works hard gets the (financial) spoils.

Today, there was a piece on BBC Radio 2 about books that people never get to finish reading. This was based on some analysis of progress of many people reading Kindle books; this being useful because researchers can see where people stop reading as they progress through each book. By far the worst case example turned out to be “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, where people tended to stop around Page 26 of a 700-page book.

The executive summary of this book was in fact quite pithy; it predicts that the (asset) rich will continue to get richer, to the expense of the rest of the population whose survival depends on receiving an income flow. Full review here. And that it didn’t happen last century due to two world wars and the 1930’s depression, something we’ve not experienced this century. So far. The book just went into great detail, chapter by chapter, to demonstrate the connections leading to the authors thesis, and people abandoned the book early en mass.

However, it sounds plausible to me; assets tend to hold their relative “value”, whereas money is typically deflationary (inflation of monetary values and devaluation through printing money, no longer anchored to a specific value of gold assets). Even the UK Government factor the devaluation in when calculating their future debt repayment commitments. Just hoping this doesn’t send us too far to repeat what happened to Rome a couple of thousand years ago or so (as cited in one of my previous blog posts here).

Stand back – intellectual deep thought follows:

The place where my brain shorted out was the thought that, if that trend continued, that at some point our tax regime would need to switch from being based monetary income flows to being based on assets owned instead. The implications of this would be very far reaching.

That’ll be a tough sell – at least until everyone thinks we’ve returned to a feudal system and the crowds with pitchforks appear on the scene.

European Courts have been great; just one fumble to correct

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Delete Spoof Logo

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…

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Great Customer Service

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.

 

Uber in London: The Streisand Effect keeps on giving

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Uber Logo

With the same overall theme as yesterday, if you’re looking at your future, step one is to look at what your customers would value, then to work back to the service components to deliver it.

I’ve followed Uber since I first discovered them in San Francisco, and it looks a simple model – to the user. You want to go from where you are to another local destination. You typically see where the closest driver is to you on your smartphone. You ask your handset for a price to go to a specific destination. It tells you. If you accept, the car is ordered and comes to pick you up. When you get dropped off, your credit card is charged, and both you and the taxi driver get the opportunity to rate each other. Job done.

Behind that facade is a model of supply and demand. Taxi drivers that can clock on and off at will. At times of high demand and dwindling available ride capacity, prices are ramped up (to “surge” pricing) to encourage more drivers onto the road. Drivers and customers with voluminous bad ratings removed. Drivers paid well enough to make more money than those in most taxi firms ($80-90,000/year in New York), or the freedom to work part time – even down to a level where your reward is to pay for your car for a few hours per week of work, and have free use of it at other times.

The service is simple and compelling enough that i’d have thought tax firms would have cottoned onto how the service works, and to replicate it before Uber ever appeared on these shores. But, with a wasted five years, they’ve appeared – and Taxi drivers all over Europe decided to run the most effective advertising campaign for an upstart competitor in their history. A one-day 850% subscriber growth; that really takes some doing, even if you were on the same side.

I’m just surprised that whoever called the go-slows all over Europe didn’t take the time out to study what we in the tech industry know as “The Streisand Effect” – Wikipedia reference here. BBC Radio 2 even ran a segment on Uber at lunchtime today, followed by every TV News Bulletin i’ve heard since. I downloaded the app as a result of hearing it on that lunchtime slot, as I guess many others did too (albeit no coverage in my area 50 miles West of London – yet). Given the five years of missed prep time, I think they’ve now lost – or find themselves in fast follower mode to incorporate similar technology into their service before they have a mass exodus to Uber (of customers, then drivers).

London Cabbies do know all the practical use of rat runs that SatNav systems are still learning, but even that is a matter of time now. I suspect appealing for regulation will, at best, only delay the inevitable.

The safest option – given users love the simplicity and lack of surprises in the service – is to get busy quickly. Plenty of mobile phone app prototyping help available on the very patch that London Black Cab drivers serve.