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Innovation at the Edge of Elecricity

Although this is almost exactly a year old and quite US-centric, the video below “Innovation at the Edge of Electricity” was made. It has some great stories that may well make the minds of anyone living in the US or Europe boggle at how true innovation is happening in the developing world without any “help” from regulators or lawmakers.

As technology is forcing industry convergence, it is not just the Western-style Telecoms regulation that is getting in the way, but the rules and regulations from the Electricity and Banking Industries too. For instance, look to Africa, not Europe or the US if you want to see what true innovation is on mobile payments.

Many of the stories are particularly helpful when we think at how we should rollout faster broadband to the so-called “Final Third”. Innovation has always happened on the edge of the network. Surely it is time for us to include some of these new ideas from the “edge of electricity” and adapt them to our own requirements. Or will we let the regulators carry on regulating our service industries to die a slow, painful death?

Well worth watching to the end.

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On AV, Bees, the Delphi Method and Other Voting Systems

For those who know me well, they will know I keep bees. Last week I caught the first swarm of the year in a tree in the local town – which was very satisfying. I also have another blog at http://beelore.com In one of my posts on that blog last year I noted the amazing way that bees vote for a new home.  This research even has its own site

Funny thing is that in the UK we have to decide between the current so-called “First Past the Post” system and the “Alternative Voting System”.  Pretty bi-polar.  Pretty bonkers.

What would the bees do?  The scouts would look at many and several voting systems and would (depending on the amount of energy exhibited for each system) come back to the 95% in the swarm and dance the story with a waggle.

It is such a strong idea that a guy called Thomas.D. Seeley actually wrote a book about it last year called “Honeybee Democracy”.

Here is extract from a review:

“In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together–as a swirling cloud of bees–to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader’s influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution.”

So I vote for a new kind of democracy based on 50 million years of wisdom!  The trouble is, I don’t think such an option will be on the ballot paper in the UK elections this Thursday!   I am still not sure whether AV is a step in the right direction – but it seems to be closer to the system that the bees have developed than the current First-Past-The-Post system.

If the internet age is going to really impact democracy in a useful way, then the Delphi Method is a much closer match with what the bees do than the currently proposed AV system. Here is an extract from Wikipedia:

The Delphi method (pronounced /ˈdɛlfaɪ/ DEL-fy) is a structured communication technique, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.

In the standard version, the experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the “correct” answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.


Other versions, such as the Policy Delphi, have been designed for normative and explorative use, particularly in the area of social policy and public health. In Europe, more recent web-based experiments have used the Delphi method as a communication technique for interactive decision-making and e-democracy.

The outstanding issue for me is how do we reform democracy quickly and effectively to keep pace with the challenges the planet faces?  The bi-polar choice we have been given in the UK elections avoids the issue of how we reshape the Western democratic system to become much better at decision making.  I would vote for the bees or the Delphi system over any First-Past-The-Post or AV system.  But this Thursday we are not being given that choice!  All of your thoughts gratefully received!

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Writer’s Block, Blooks and Going with the Flow

We have all had it. That frustrating blankness that hits you when you want to write something. Those who know me, know that I have been trying to write a book on bees since 1986. I am not sure if this is worthy of an entry in the Guinness Book of Records – but this work of art has been a long time in the womb!

Coincidentally today, I had an extraordinarily energetic meeting brainstorming out a new marketing strategy for a company. We really got “in the flow”. At the end of the meeting I had to take 5 minutes out just to re-tune to normality. One of the people at the meeting started talking about left-brained and right-brained thinking – and pointed me to the work and theories of Gabriele Rico.  Gabrielle has written a book that has sold over 500,000 copies called “Writing the Natural Way”.

On investigating the theories, I was struck by how similar they are to many of the methods I use in my work.  I use Spider Diagrams or Mind Maps a lot to brainstorm-out ideas – and then clump or cluster them into patterns or blocks of ideas – before finally looking for a natural sequence or flow that works well for the problem set in question.  I really liked Gabriele’s names for the two sides of the brain – “Sign Mind” and “Design Mind“.  Sign mind (left hemisphere) thinks linearly, parts-specifically, logically, one step at a time, while the Design mind (right hemisphere) thinks in whole patterns, drawing on images, emotional webs, sensory patterns, as in a memory that suddenly flashes into consciousness as a complex whole.  So similar to the attributes missing in the Organisational Caetextia article I wrote with Mark Richards last year.

So it got me thinking – why don’t I actually use this very effective technique to help me write the book?  And it made me realise that my my work and other activities at home are so time-consuming that the real issue wasn’t so much writers block, but time deficiency!  Although I have already created the chapters, the themes, the plot, I just need to sit down and write.  But I am not a natural writer.  I prefer telling stories aloud.  I prefer drawing pictures.  Anything but writing.  Gabrielle’s theory says I should be using my right brain (or Design Mind) first – and then start writing…

Actually, this problem is really why I started to blog.  Because I thought: if I write regularly in small chunks about things that interest me, then I hope to overcome this writer’s block that I have.  I set up another blog – http:/beelore.com – a few years ago.  And it really does seem to work – this blogging thing.  Little and often is better than being blocked and producing nothing at all.

Which means that I don’t currently plan to finish the book – because by the time I have done everything else, I actually don’t want to find the time to write the book.

I would rather work, play and blog; and go with the flow.  For the moment – anyway.  Than write a massive book.  On bees.  That probably few will read.  And certainly not over 500,000!  The rough numbers that read Gabriele’s book!

In fact I called beelore a “blook” – sort of cross of a book and a blog.  So maybe I havn’t got writer’s block…..I have simply replaced it with a new age, Web 2.0 writer’s blook!

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Escaping Flatland Thinking

I came across this short excerpt from the great film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” – in which Dr Quantum visits Flatland.  Makes you think!

And if you enjoyed that, you might enjoy this – which will begin to stretch your brain quite a bit:

And if you are still with me, come with me to the tenth dimension!

And if you are still with it, then you must be thinking: “Aren’t there really 11 dimensions?” – well here we are for a final brain stretcher:

And if you have gotten this far, I’ll next meet you in anti-time with Rob Bryanton!

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Space: The Final Frontier

I live in the country. I live in the so-called Final Third. Ofcom call it a “Market 1” area – because BT is the only fixed-line service provider providing the physical lines that broadband and telephony run across.

This week, three different views hit me that have changed my whole view on how we roll out broadband to the final third. I expect many of my readers will have switched off by now – but bear with me – because I think it might interest you.

The first view was from Adrian Wooster’s blog – where he has produced a really interesting picture of what the spread of the UK’s broadband looks like by postcode – one image of which I have copied below:

Click on the image on Adrian’s blog site to see each scenario – it loops back at the end to highlight the gulf between where we’re starting from to where we need to get to.  Each spot of light represents a postcode.

At the moment the image only covers England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own statistical output area systems which individually need resolving to postcode level.

The interesting thing is that most of the “final third” remains in the dark – even at 95% coverage!

That got me thinking.  What will be available from WiFi/Mobile/Radio technologies by 2015?  Regular readers will know that I am interested in LightPeak – but there have been two other announcements this week that are very interesting and makes you think differently about broadband for the final third in 2015.

The first was from Alcatel Lucent – who have just announced the launch of the lightRadio cube which can be installed wherever there is electricity.

So this little device will dramatically reduce the costs of deploying mobile phone base stations – whilst allowing extended coverage of 3g networks to areas that are currently far too expensive to cover.

The second was from an In-Stat Report – stating that a new Wi-Fi technology standard called 802.11ac has been developed to provide Gigabit speeds across WiFi networks.  The report predicts 1bn devices shipped with this technology by 2015 – which will allow streaming of high quality video to the TV set – or downloads of BlueRay DVDs in 6 seconds.I expect that many, if not most, will be mobile devices of some sort.

Add these two developments together and you get a very interesting set of technologies that may be able to provide 1Gbps speeds (depending on availability of backhaul) to most households in the country that are not provided with a direct link – i.e those who are in the dark areas on the map.  That is 500 times faster than our current unambitious target for 2Mbps….and will require the cooperation of mobile operators and fixed-line operators who can provide much faster backahual speeds.

Exciting stuff – but I wonder if today’s #digitalbritain thinking is really embracing such ideas as these to create a truly competitive infrastructure for those in the power of the Dark Lord?  As these new technologies are enabled, the bottleneck may well move to the backhaul.  Which is why the current ideas around Fibre to the Community or “Digital Village Pumps” will become even more important.  Then again, I would prefer to redefine FTTH as Fibre to the Hamlet – like the one I live in – or Fibre to the Clachan – as they say in more Celtic countries!

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Hereafter and History Homework

Last night I went to see the Clint Eastwood directed movie – Hereafter.  I thoroughly enjoyed it as I had a near-death experience in the 1980s – and it sang true to many of the things that happened to me at the time – but which I have not really been able to articulate since.

The ironic thing was that I had attended a parents evening the night before and found that my son was struggling with his History and English essay writing. I took my son out to dinner before the film and explained to him that when I sit down to write something of any length, I always do it back-to-front. “Begin with the end in mind”. That sort of thing. I also use this very powerful tool in the work that I do. Some call it envisioning. I call it “Back-to-Front” Thinking. I then thread the important threads through the storyline to create drama, interest and tensions that get resolved at the end (which I have already written). I am no great writer – but I find this technique is so powerful, it has allowed me to express my ideas much better than any technique I was taught at school. I suppose in tech-speak it is like reverse engineering….but on original work and not copied from someone else.

Now when we got out of the film, the two pieces fitted so neatly together! The writer of the Hereafter movie, Peter Morgan, must have written the script back-to-front. How else could he have done it?

Like reading a good book, the film has three threads – a man with psychic powers, a woman writer-journalist who lives a near-death experience and a young boy who….well I don’t want to give too much away! The three threads dance through the film until they resolve each other’s tensions and stories at the end. What good movie or book doesn’t?

So back to Homework. I wondered why I was never taught this technique at school? I think of all the painful experiences where I had to sit down and write – without being told how it important it is to design before doing? I wonder why we don’t talk about the “how” of the structure to produce fine art – and make it much easier for young folk to succeed in what is really quite a simple technique.

Thinking of the UK government and the UK economy, I wonder if it is time for a bit of back-to-front thinking there too?

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The Tail that Wagged the Dog

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there lived a Queen. The Queen had ruled for many years in a land that had plentiful supplies of food and fuel. She was a good ruler and let life carry on beneath her.

However, in the last 10 years, times had become hard because the Exchequer had not been managed the country’s finances at all well and the country was at war in a foreign land.

In the past year the First Minister had been replaced with the day-to-day matters of state being handled by two brothers – David and Nicholas. They had put their efforts into a new vision for the country called The Big Idea…..but few really understood what the Big Idea was or how it could be made to happen.

One of the most critical matters of state was the control of information and each of the six Barons – each with their own Baronial Halls were constantly battling each other to control the information to the masses. The six barons were:

House of Hunters – led by Baron Jeremy – who was closely related to the Prince of Com and had a good degree of influence in matters of government
House of Living – nominally led by Baroness Liv – but the real power was with her uncle Baron Stone
House of Virgins – led by Baron Branson who had many interests and many females dressed in long red dresses
House of Skydivers – led by Baron Murdoch – who also owned many newspapers and town criers
House of Oxygen – led by some Spanish guy who had no name and lived far away
House of Chatter – led by Baron Dun of Stone – (but no relation to Baron Stone in the House of Living)

The rules under which these six Houses were controlled was led by one of the Queen’s Princes – The Prince Of Com.

Now the Prince of Com actually had very little power over the barons because the Queen was weak and the barons were strong.

========

continuation of the story suggested by David Brunnen…..

And, moreover, the country was only just recovering from a plague of rational meerkats who had, over the past ten years, destroyed the infrastructure of the country so that anyone intent on building new foundations for the future found that the ground kept collapsing beneath their feet and that no end of short-term fixes could solve the problem.

Then came the day when the Barons battling over control of information to the masses suddenly found that the citizens were not listening or reading because their old copper connections had collapsed and (to make it worse) the libraries had all closed down.  And the Bossy Barons said ‘We are agrieved – the Prince of Com has been delinquent’.

But Baron Hunter said he had a plan to banish the Prince of Com to outer darkness (or at least beyond the visible spectrum) – but only if all the other barons stopped arguing and pledged their loyalty to the Queen and David & Nicholas’s Big Idea.
And the story might have ended happily right there except that one of the Baron’s underlings (from the Isle of  Mob) got wind of this secret agreement and made headlines.
The people revolted – saying ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ and ‘The government is revolting’ and from that day onwards they all went round and round in circles until someone put up his hand and said ‘Excuse me, but I have a very Small Idea’ and they all stopped to listen.
And, for the first time in ages (well, as far as anyone can now remember) the entire country was very very quiet –
Thanks, Chris, for the next contribution:

until one small boy (whose mother should have kept him in doors) said “Why not build a network ourselves?”

All the councilors in Mordor were horrified.

You could hear their squeaks through middle earth, but the little boy persisted, and soon others started to listen, it was like a fairy tale, but soon the people started to realise it was a dream that could come true when he explained how it would work.

He put it in a pdf so everyone could read about it:

http://broadbandcumbria.com/wp-content/uploads/Barry%20Forde.pdf

Now the Prince of Com and the House of Hunters were keen on this small boy’s ideas, but many of the Baronial Houses were not so sure as they would lose power to these new upstarts. So they started to develop new strategies so that  they could keep control of their lands in the future.

In the meantime, the small boy decided to go into the countryside and talk to many folk in the land about the opportunities that these new ideas presented.  The small boy, whose name was Lux, was accompanied on these travels by his loyal dog, Fico.

Everywhere that Lux went, his dog, Fico, was sure to follow.

Now, as Lux travelled the land, he  discovered many people had  the same problems.  They were all fed up paying taxes to their barons for little in return and many were becoming very interested in  leaving serfdom to become Free Men and Women – if only they could be brave enough to do it.  Some small villages in the borderlands started to declare independence and the Barons became concerned.  The House of Living – which had tremendous powers over many parts of the land was particularly concerned at the declaration of these new “Free Communities” – and the Prince of Com became ever more worried about the eventual outcome that this new way of thinking would bring.

There was deep unrest in the land.

Thanks to Guy Jarvis, for the following addition to this exciting story!

Much was the talk and grumbling in the digitally deprived communities, known as Notspots, for they had neither bit nor bucket.

The first community to break free from the Baron Telecom’s thrall was an ancient place, settled since Roman times and in all likelihood well before.

Abandoned by Baron T, anyways beyond the reach of his digital dog whistle, the good folks of Ashby de la Launde decided that action was required.

The question was what to do and the answer provided by the Wizards of Witham (South) seemed too good to be true:

“There is a 4th utility enterprise looking to invest in the first community ready to dare to reject the old copper gods and turn towards the light”

And thus became nextgenus.net/bookplus and that is another story.

Baron T fretted lobbyingly about choice and adoptability in the hope that the House of Living and Prince of Com might yet lose faith in the pure glass path and return to the coppery legacy of yore.

The stakes were high and the standoff Mexican until Baron T gained a taste for the FiWiPie and learned to share and that is another story too.

Please add your ideas on how the story continues in the comments block below!


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Working Through the Big Freeze

I had a commute-from-hell to get home on Tuesday night with a train being broken down in front of mine and my train taking the side-track via a suburban frozen waste.  Not fun.  I decided to stop commuting for the rest of the week.

For the past two days I have greatly benefitted from the efforts in the past ten years to provide broadband to our country and community.  It has allowed me to work from home and do email, Skype calls and productive work from my home office.  When I had my own business in 1996 we had dial-up, the internet was very basic, and working from home was a combination of very slow email with very slow browsing on an internet that had very little information.  It was so slow, in fact, that I had to go back and get a “proper job”.

Today’s internet experience is now very workable– even though my meagre 2-3Mbps kept on dropping in and out with the pressure of other home workers using the internet in the village.  I was actually much more productive, spending the 4 or 5 hours that I might have spent on a train (had the trains been running) doing real work in the warmth of my home.  That said, when I mentioned to a friend of mine (who lives in Reigate and gets 50Mbps) that we had only just got 2-4 Mbps and he laughed out loud as they now say!

In some senses, what we have now is SO much better than what we had before (in the mid 1990s), that there is room for complacency and a sense that we have enough broadband….

But in the new world – (the world we are now creating) – the jobs will have to be (globally) competitive and will require a completely NEW superfast broadband infrastructure for the UK.  It will have many of the basic characteristics of what we have now – such as browsing, internet, e-commerce and video, but it will become safer, faster, more stable, much more interactive, have a lot more video (where you can see the people you are talking to) and have a far greater global reach.  Smartphones and HDTV are likely to hasten the innnovation.

So we must invest in the Next Generation Broadband TODAY.  That means putting fibre optic cables much closer – and eventually into the homes we live in and businesses we work in (often, as I proved today, the same thing).  With climate change, the weather is likely to become more unpredictable  (how many times in our memories have we had commuter-disrupting snow in November?).

Sure, some jobs, like food distributors can’t work on the internet alone.  But many new jobs can be created that can take the shocks of climate change and economic fluctuations.  Perhaps the Big Freeze will have made people think a bit more about the potential of new forms of work and the relationship between work and travel.  Much like the Fax did in the 1980s when we had a postal strike.

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A Question of Ambition

I spent the first couple of days this week presenting, moderating and participating at the Next Generation National Broadband conference in Birmingham. I came away feeling very uplifted and inspired about the opportunities that the Next Generation of Broadband services will present to our communities, counties and country.

Before the conference, I had keenly signed-up for BT’s “Race to Infinity” campaign, believing that if we could get enough votes, we might be one of the five prize winning villages to get the next generation of Superfast Broadband and become one of the most connected villages in the Weald of Kent. How wrong I was!

When I got home from the conference, I read the small-print for this campaign. You can only win if your exchange gets 1000 votes.  As the exchange that I use only has 1100 lines, we would need over 90% of those in our community to sign-up. Add to that the fact that those with two lines per address can only vote once (and many still have two lines for business/home use or for a fax machine) as well as the fact that the BT database is sometimes wrong (i.e. the postcode doesn’t match the number) – and the opportunity to enter the race (which requires 1000 votes as a minimum) is a lost cause from the start.
If the UK really wants to have the “best” superfast broadband in Europe, then we are going to have to re-think how the final third is provided for.  This got got me thinking – what about creating our own schemes…..

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Comment on the DCMS Business Plan for the Delivery of UK Broadband

I have posted on the DCMS website, commenting on their recently published Business Plan for Broadband.  Interesting to see if they actually publish it.  In any case, they cannot vet what I put on my own blog – so here is what I wrote:
“A perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterise our age” as Einstein so rightly said.
These milestones are mere inch-pebbles…..
Jeremy Hunt’s ambition of only five months ago that: “within this Parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe” has been diluted to a set of muddled objectives and easily-achievable short-term meetings, studies, consultations and (yet-to-start) round tables.  And the heading of “super-fast” has been subtly changed to “universal” which is muddling the Universal Service Obligation with what the best superfast broadband network in Europe should really be…
Meanwhile, BT has gone public on a very effective campaign which is designed to create a very un-level paying field for Next Generation Access.  BT, Virgin Media and the other so-called ISPs will continue to compete in the same (urban and semi-urban) areas that they have on the current LLU regime.  A “completed” milestone of examined barriers has clouded the fact that the recently announced business rates regime has put more barriers in place for new networks – not removed them.  We can examine barriers until the cows come home.  We need the barriers removed, not examined!
Ambitions for open access infrastructure (ducts and poles) are riddled with practical issues that will mean BT will continue to play a waiting game.
Openreach is not “open’, yet we continue to use the word “open” without defining any new structures required for the fibre revolution and relying on old structures that were created for copper networks – simply because it is easier.
And the market testing community-led pilots are out-of-phase with the infrastructure sharing milestone – such that BT is far more likely to be able to give a compelling bid for each scheme and wipe the slate clean than if the infrastructure was truly open.  Well constructed plans need to understand that certain milestones will have dependencies on others.  The project plan needs to be laid-out rather than created as a list, so that these dependencies can be understood and the milestones phased accordingly.
We MUST get our purpose, objectives and milestones better aligned in this critical programme!  This is a matter of national survival on the increasingly competitive landscape of the global internet economy – and we have very little time (perhaps six months to a year) to get our act together.
These milestones are very unlikely to achieve what we need by when we need it.
However, not to be over-critical, there has been some good work.  The recently published Digital Scotland report for a far more ambitious and coherent plan with some great ideas on how to connect Broadband to Big Society and provide speeds much closer to what “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” might look like.  But it is not clear that Westminster can hear Edinburgh down the communication lines of two countries with different political parties in leadership positions and with Scotland coming up to  Elections and the rest of the UK trying to work out what they actually voted for!
It is time to wash-away these inch-pebbles and create a national debate and a coherent joined-up plan on this important subject with real, competitive milestones that will create a national, shared, fibre infrastructure (such as has recently been announced by Italy) as well as to bridge both the geographic and social digital divides with real connections and real training and participation rather than the political verbiage that we have become used to over the past few years.
We will be challenging the current thinking at the NextGen ’10 conference in Birmingham on 22-23rd November.
If Big Society is to happen (and be supported by the necessary digital infrastructure required), then this part of the Business Plan needs re-thinking – particularly if we are really going to deliver on the excellent ambition set out by Jeremy Hunt in June.
Thank you for being open enough to allow me to comment and please take the comments as a constructive contribution to what is a truly vital part of the government’s business plan.
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