Showing posts with label tech. Show all posts

iWatch & wearable tech

Much has been made lately of Apple's latest announcements of the iPhone 6 and their new Apple watch, and really, I'm pretty late to the party on this one.  I don't normally comment much on Apple announcements, but this time I fancied a rant.


Personally, it's not to my tastes. I know the strap is inter-changeable, and you can change the watch face screen, but I'm not a fan.  In part, because I am more of a fan of classic watch design (so really, some of the photos of the Moto-360 look closer to what I would want a smartwatch to look like), but generally, it feels a little garish, and a bit like something designed 5 years ago.  The curved, almost bubble like glass shape of the device, the square watch face.



I'm not sure what it is.

Maybe its because it feels at odds with current web design trends on flat design. Maybe its because it feels like the original iPhone matured/evolved from it's original curved shape to the current sharper, flatter designed shape and this still seems to hark back to the original iPhone design.

Anyway, as an aside, I think if I was going to spend hundreds on a flash-y digital watch, I would quite like this one:



Sure, I can't check emails on it, but it looks nice.  But then I'm not really someone who should be commenting on style and fashion, so will stick to tech trends..


Is wearable tech the next big thing?


Honestly, I think probably not. Not for the time being at least. I'm sure some smart people will work the market out eventually, but for the time being, and with the current incarnations of smartwatches, I don't think the market is really there.


So, here's the thing - I'm not really sure what the point of the apple watch is (and I guess that is what needs to be cracked before the market can take off). I think, it's going to face the same challenges that tablets have faced - it needs to grow up and work out what it is. It needs to understand what its purpose is and find its niche - it's not going to be good enough to be the same as a smartphone but a different form.


Let's have a look at the markets:

Smartphones:
  • Defined and fairly standard "upgrade-cycles" - the expectation and standard of upgrading devices every 12-24 months is fairly established in the west, and this is both driving existing customers to newer, better devices, but is also slowly migrating existing feature phone users to smartphones.
  • Everyone has one - at its core, as a phone/communication device it provides that roaming communication functionality and is at least one per-person (not shared)
  • Convenience - easy to carry and roam.

Tablets:
  • No real defined upgrade-cycle (in terms of device contracts) and too early to see patterns being established - optimistically will fall back to traditional PC cycles of approximately every 5 years
  • Not per-person devices - You might be safe to typically expect everyone in an average household to have a (smart)phone, but probably only one/two tablets per house.
  • It doesn't solve any real problem - sure, its a little better for watching movies than a smartphone, but apps, browsing, emails and other comms are not noticably better. Further, tasks that might need greater control, or screen real estate - like creating spreadsheets, or presentation slides for example - people still fall back on using regular PCs. There needs to be a purpose/task/app that is made for a tablet sized device - where tablets solve a problem that only they can. As of yet, we're still waiting.

Smartwatches:
  • Still yet to see upgrade cycles - will be interesting if carriers/manufacturers try to tie these into existing mobile contract structuring. It will make adoption even harder if they try to sell it with a 1-2 year lifecycle for sure.
  • Aimed to be per-person, as a sidekick to your smartphone - but if all it offers is your smartphone in a slightly different form, its again going to be a tough sell - Sure, its slightly more convenient than getting your phone out of your pocket, but that seems like a dubious USP to base an entire market on.
  • It doesn't solve a problem - Again, there needs to be a task/area/job where the smart watch is the answer. Where it fills a need that simply can't be filled by a smartphone (or can be, but is a pain in the ass)



For a change, let's have a look at some smartphone/tablet data:


Tablet sales struggle: Apple iPad growth projections by quarter

(Source: Computer World: As tablet growth slows, Apple may face a year-long iPad sales contraction )

Just focusing on Apple for the moment, Benedict Evans presents some interesting data analysis of their recent sales/revenue numbers. Firstly, we see that iPad sales have flattened out and basically settled where they are for the last two years, whilst iPhones have continued to see growth year on year:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/4/25/ipad-growth
(Source: Benedict Evans - iPad growth - Apple's trailing 12months sales)


More generally, if we look at the comparison of sales across PC vs Android/Apple smartphones, we see that PCs have levelled out, but the smartphone continues to see huge growth:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/4/25/ipad-growth
(Source: Benedict Evans - iPad growth - General shipping - PCs vs Smartphones)




It really looks like the smartphone market is continuing to surge. With standard upgrade-cycles, and low end Android smartphones becoming more widely accessible, this trend seems set to continue.

On the other hand, until the tablet market works out its purpose and finds a niche, I think it will continue to stagnate with fairly flat growth. 

It feels to me like a similar fate awaits smartwatches, until someone comes up with a compelling problem that the watch form factor solves, I think it will struggle to see big growth in the market.
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GitHub as a CV (GaaC)

Over the recent year or so, as it has become more popular throughout the tech industry, there has been a growing amount of discussion around the idea of "GitHub as a CV" - the idea of using your online tech footprint, primarily for most people in the form of your GitHub profile, as a CV and a better representation of a potential employees ability/preference/mindset etc. There has even been a GitHub project that can automatically create a CV for you based on your profile: http://resume.github.io/ (here is mine - depressing that Coldfusion features so highly in the stats though!).  Over at NerdAbility we have really taken that idea forward (incorporating other sites like BitBucket, GoogleCode, Coursera, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, etc) and is obviously something that we think is a good idea.

But its a bad idea..

A big argument against it is that it furthers the already engrained bias towards white men. If you look at the demographic of the most active GitHub profiles there is no denying the common pattern.

I agree completely - that using GitHub as a filtering mechanism or pre-requisite for a candidate sucks. You really shouldn't do that. I have had conversations with agents where they have told me that a client only wants to see candidates who contribute to OSS, and I have declined. It doesn't qualify a candidate as being half-way competent and rules out lots of very competent people who don't have spare time to work on OSS (multiple jobs, family responsibility).


Just another data point..

I guess this is really the point here. You shouldn't rule out candidates because they don't have GitHub accounts, just like you shouldn't rule out a candidate for not having a degree etc.  I think we can all agree tech recruiting is hard, and its really hard to assess whether someone is actually a good developer and not just blagging it - so a computer scientist, I'm grateful for as much data to help with this decision as possible.

It's not that a candidate with an active GitHub profile trumps one without, but it means that its another point in an interview that we can try and use to tease out  a little bit more of an insight into the candidates skills, interests, passions.

GitHub is another point on your CV (if you are fortunate enough to have the time to setup and contribute to a GitHub profile) - just like your academic achievements and career history or anything else you choose to put on there.  If you have an interesting project it can be a talking point for an interview, in much the same way an interesting role on your CV would be.  From my point of view, I love going into interviews and hearing that the interviewer has checked out my projects on GitHub, and when the inevitable "tell us about an interesting/challenging/etc project/problem you have had" comes up, it's great to be able to talk about projects on GitHub that they have seen - not just because I know the project well, but also it will inevitably be a project that I am passionate about (otherwise I wouldn't be doing it in my spare time!).


We shouldn't be demanding OSS contributions, or set online profiles, or StackOverflow credibility - but we probably shouldn't be dismissing it as irrelevant.
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Everything is Technology

So, having pondered the merits and likely outcome of the UK government's Year of Code initiative, you could rightly be left to ponder, "who cares?". A lot of the UK's population may not consider themselves hugely tech savvy, and certainly not formally trained in tech, and we are getting by. The country has naturally produced enough nerds/tech folk to keep us as a respectable tech power in the modern world. Plus, kids these days are so emersed with tech/internet/mobiles they will be naturally equipped for the future world of work.

Maybe?


A little while ago, Marc Andreessen (of Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) wrote an article titled "Why software is eating the world", referring to the pervasiveness of tech and how slowly, tech, and the internet, is disrupting more and more industries, changing the way they operate and where/how they compete for profit.

So the question is, will being "power users" on Facebook, CandyCrush, Twitter, etc be enough in the predicted software devoured world?

Some obvious examples of industries that are now tech industries spring to mind:
  • Amazon - completely changed the face of retail and is almost single handedly making high streets around the uk obsolete
  • iTunes et al - once again, changed the face of the music industry, record shops etc
  • AirBnB - changing the way that people think about travel and disrupting the hotel/holiday accommodation industry.


High profile and a very real, visible impact on the economy, and as Andreesen quotes in his article:
"Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software."

The important bit being "its core capability is its amazing software engine" - Amazon isn't a retail business, its a tech business - its core skills and expertise, and the majority of its employees are in tech.  The fact that it can branch out so easily into its Cloud services is testament to that. They have an amazing tech platform, with amazing tech folk, that is their business.

So that's an obvious example - we aren't all going to be working at Amazon/Google etc. But the thing is, its not just the obvious examples that are being disrupted. Let's look at an industry that is apparently yet to be disrupted: insurance. Any big online insurers coming in and turning things on their head the way amazon did retail? Nope. Look for any form of personal insurance in the UK and lots of familiar names still come up: The AA, Tesco, First Direct, Royal & Sun Alliance etc. Look a bit beneath the surface though, and you will realise the industry has really become a tech arms-race. Aggregator websites like money supermarket.com or comparethemarket.com have indirectly completely changed the industry with tech.

What was once a very personal industry, all about understanding people & risks and where an experienced actuary held the power, has become a race to the bottom in terms of latency and efficiency for quote generation.  The aggregator sites drive so much traffic to insurers (approximately 60% of all insurance quotes originate from these sites), and such high volumes (~10-11 million a month) that to stay in business, insurers have to have the tech to serve up quotes a) faster than others b) cheaper than others.

If your system costs a penny more to generate a quote than your competitor, at 11 million quotes a month, that's an extra £110,000 you need to generate every month (thats the cost just to generate the quotes - if you don't actually manage to convert any of those quotes, that's a pretty quick path to bankruptcy), which is most likely going to push up your premiums, which will in turn decrease your chance of conversion.

Honestly, with so many of these companies having to support monolithic legacy tech systems, I would be surprised if they didn't soon get replaced - all a start-up would need is financial backing to underwrite the claims, and a few decent tech folk to build a web friendly (web services, REST etc.) insurance system, built with aggregators in mind plus a slick web app to allow easy (and free) policy management, and they could probably undercut and offer better customer service than the all the big guns so severely that they would have no choice but retire.

EVERYONE, LEARN TO CODE. NOW!


No. Not really. 

Does everyone need to know how to code? Of course not. The point of introducing tech more prominently to the curriculum is obviously far from aiming to turn all of the future generations into coders. It is simply just to raise awareness/understanding of computers, and possibly slightly increase the number of coders we produce. It is after all only raising tech so its seen more alongside other key subjects like maths, science, english etc and we haven't all turned out to be mathematicians have we?

The uk has a great history of scientists, writers, artists and also computer scientists, but these days when people talk global tech Silicon Valley always comes up first. Would be good if we started to change that right?

Everything Is Everything.. Change, it comes eventually.
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Year of Code: Can it be that it was all so simple

I'm not sure if we should be pleased with the UK Governments Year of Code or not. Sure, it's a train wreck, it has been a shambles in term of organisation and PR - sometimes in a spectacular fashion, like when the well connected but not so well informed "Director of Coding" appeared on Newsnight - and undoubtedly from what we have seen, it will be poorly executed.


But on the plus the initiative is there. The government have recognised the importance of the tech industry to the country and its economy, which has got to be a good thing?

Every now and then the Government suprises us, with positive, forward thinking iniatives such as David Cameron embracing and pushing Silicon Roundabout (London's answer to Silicon valley) and spending time and energy on pushing the tech agenda for the city and country, or their design principle guidelines. And I think this opportunity has a lot of potential.

Did Lottie Dexter (the founder/director of Year of Code) make an ass of herself on Newsnight? Sure. But that is really just about her being poorly prepared/thought through. Were her comments about learning to code in a day worrying and possibly betraying a deeper lack of understanding of the task at hand? Sure. But all she needs is people around her who do understand these things - I have no problem at all with Lottie Dexter not knowing how to code - it's a classic pattern of non-tech CEO and tech co-founders that has been common place in Silicon Valley for years. It's great for her saying she wants to learn to code, and its undoubtedly good PR for the initiative, but that should be all it is - PR. She is not the CTO or Head of Engineering or anything else vaguely tech related. And the good news is she has got a lot of smart tech folk on board, who will have a deep understanding of tech and code, take a look at some of the board:


The list goes on. A lot of smart tech folks.

Really though, I would have liked to have seen more. I would have liked to seen the government take a leaf out of Obama's book and just hand it over to the startup ecosystem altogether - Obama completely handed over his election campaign tech to a bunch of great tech startup guys and left them to it, and it turned out pretty great (that's a long read, but well worth it). Really incentive-ise and provide the means to startup folks to really be creative with some ideas. If there is an industry that is just waiting to be disrupted it's got to be education - and whilst the government won't be opening up the whole education system for innovation and disruption any time soon, these changes to the tech curriculum are a real opportunity to start testing the waters with alternative and innovative approaches to education and inspiring children to become life-long learners.


On the whole, it's a positive step. The government has recognised that the tech curriculum is important and have an initiative with lots of smart folks on board.  The main concern I have is the tech curriculum and what happens with it - with all this emphasis on learning to code, and curiculums that get kids making e-cards. I have my doubts that coding or low level computing should be taught at primary school level. The best would probably be something like starting actual programming at comprehensive/secondary school level.  If you want a good grounding in tech, teaching kids at primary school to create e-cards is probably not the way to do it. Teaching basic logic and reasoning would, in my oppinion, be a much better grounding. And I'm not talking Formal Logic, I mean just thinking through puzzles, thinking rationally to work things out. It may sound odd, but I would love to see us start teaching kids from a young age about logic and problem solving through play.  Lego, Brio, etc. are great tools for learning to think logically, whilst also being creative

As a thought experiment, how about we give a bunch of primary school classes a Brio train set. Get kids in to teams, give them each a bunch of track and set the following objectives:
  • Make a train track that uses all the pieces (give them lots of pieces, including the various track switching pieces and merging/splitting pieces)
  • Design a track whereby every piece of track can be driven down in either direction without ever taking a train off the track (this is actually quite hard - I quite often find tracks I build with my son to end up with segments whereby once you take a particular junction you are destined to follow the same track route for ever)
  • Move the teams around and get the kids to try and find flaws in the design as per the point above.

One exercise doesn't make a curriculum, but it's an approach - it takes rational thinking, team working, problem solving and hopefully, is engaging and fun. Getting children enjoying learning and problem solving is a good grounding for going on into tech - after all, being able to design train tacks to a particular specification and being able to identify flaws in them is not that much different from designing code - understanding the use of track switches and considering the different implications/paths of multiple switches/junctions is exactly the same as being able to understand and think through conditional routing through code but without the syntax. I might be missing something on this "design an e-card" curriculum, but Brio is already sounding a whole lot better.

The re-think of the tech curriculum offers an ideal opportunity to shake up the way we think about education and take a step away from traditional test-focused, memorising of information approach and a step towards a more engaging approach that also helps teach children the joys of learning.
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Essential Resources to Become a Life Long Learner (in tech)

Is one of your New Year Resolutions to re-skill? Thinking about re-training for a new career (or even just a new hobby) in tech? Then you're in luck! 

Today, more than ever, the barrier to entry for starting to learn a new technology or programming language is all but nonexistent, all you really need is a computer (or even a mobile device) and a web connection and you are pretty much good to go - just choose your preferred technology, an IDE and get started.  Almost everything is open source or at least free to use for a single developer just out to learn and there is a wealth of blogs, articles and Q'n'A sites ready to help you with tutorials, walk-through's and helpful advice - many of these backed with ready and running code bases on GitHub free for you to play with and generally work out what is going on.

However, with all these resources it can sometimes be a bit daunting with so much content. Once you have chosen a language how do you know where to start? Here are some of our favourite sites and resources that we have discovered and found useful in learning new skills:

  • iTunes U - a lesser known category on iTunes is their academic section, iTunes U(niversity) featuring loads of podcasts and lectures from a range of academic organisations, and some of this stuff is serious! Several large universities have uploaded full lecture series there, and by and large they are free to download (yes, you have to install iTunes, which sucks, we know).  Want to take the full term of Stanford university's iOS course? Its up there. Want to learn AI for chess playing from Cambridge uni? Yep, got that too. And for free.
  • MIT OpenWare - MIT have been one of the strongest advocates of open sourced education. A lot of there lecture series are online (can also be found on iTunes, but can be avoided).  Is it just us who thinks its amazing that anyone around the world with a web connection can get educated by the most prestigious academic organisations around?
  • Khan Academy - there is a lot of hype around this one, well funded with some pretty big names supporting it (jQuery creator John Resig is a Dean there), a not-for-profit aiming at providing free education for everyone. The academy provides lots of video based courses as well as interactive challenges and detailed stats on how you are doing.
  • Udacity - this is another recent, well-funded startup trying to tackle free higher education for all. Founded my three robotocists it is slowly building a very respectable catalogue of uni level courses ranging from CS101 to AI for robotics. As with the Khan academy, the lectures are purely for the web so the videos are clear and designed for remote learning (different from the filmed university lectures which are targeting classroom based learning).  We have recently created and Open Sourced the Spring-Social implementation of the Khan Academy API - so if you are working with the JVM and want to have a play with the Khan Academy API then check it out on GitHub
  • CodeAcademy - we have mentioned before we are fans of code academy, code academy is an in-browser development environment that walks you through programming exercises to help you learn with your hands - currently supporting JavaScript, HTML, Ruby and Python
  • Free eBooks - there are loads of great free eBooks available online, so many there is no point listing them, instead I will just point you here. Which leads nicely on to the next point..
  • StackOverflow - what really needs to be said about SO? It is the definitive q'n'a site for tech. If you are just starting learning head over and sign up, the help from the incredibly active community over there will be invaluable (although be sure to read the posting guides, they can be a little unforgiving at times!).
  • Coursera - Another massively popular online learning resource, this one recently generated a lot of interest with its recent Scala course taught by the original creator of the language!  We are currently working on some secret integration with Coursera at NerdAbility, and you will soon be able to integrate your Coursera account and show off which courses you have completed!

Hopefully the above resources help on your path to re-skilling.  In reality, getting your hands dirty with code and trying to solve problems and fix errors is the best way to learn, so don't forget to get stuck in - and maybe when you are more confident try answering questions on StackOverflow!

Of course, with these new found skills you will want to show them off, so we'd recommend heading to NerdAbility and registering (if you haven't as already) and update your skills, add your StackOverflow profile and even add a custom section talking about what you are learning (employers always love to know that candidates are proactive and motivated when it comes to learning new things and keeping up with technology). 

 Leave your comments with any other tools and resources you have found useful in your journey of becoming a life long learner.
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