I asked Terry to give a brief history of ethical consumerism, and problems that it faces, such as the “words-deeds inconsistency” and whether a purchase is really a vote.  I also got him to talk about his current areas of research and give some advice on how we can encourage consumers to shop ethically.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all future interviews as soon as they’re online.

Download the Mp3 audio version or even better, subscribe to the the podcast feed and get all future interviews as soon as they’re published.

The first interview is, naturally, talking with Annesley about our own project, EasyEthical.  I also mention the CarrotMobs that we’ve organised.  It was recorded in a noisy cafe with my digital camera but hopefully the audio is clear enough for you to decipher our ramblings.  The video was shot using Annesley’s Microsoft webcam on his Windows laptop, which probably explains why it randomly stopped recording for about a minute

Video version is below (feel free to embed elsewhere / re-distribute).  Alternatively you can download the mp3 audio version for your portable listening pleasure.  Even better, subscribe to the podcast feed and you’ll get each interview as soon as it is published.

I outline some of my key research findings regarding Facebook usage and suggest alternative interface concepts for browsing social news, making use of machine learning techniques and incorporating an understanding of social psychology.

For more details, please refer to the accompanying paper in Volume 2 of the conference proceedings, page. 115. The talk and paper are based on my undergraduate dissertation.

This talk won the Best Student Paper Presentation award for the conference.

In retrospect, perhaps The Foundry wasn’t the best place to start, simply because it’s somewhat atypical. The interior is strewn haphazardly with a motley assortment of donated second-hand furniture and outcast television sets. This isn’t really a bar – it’s an artist’s lair that happens to serve alcohol.

Jonathan, the bar’s long-term owner, sat in unnerving silence as we explained the concept in detail. When he finally spoke, his strongly-worded reaction took us aback slightly: “I don’t think I like you telling me what to do. I’ve been doing a lot of things here for a long time”. He pulled a bottle of “Eco Warrior” beer from the fridge and told us how he had supported a local brewery for years, and encouraged them to convert to Organic. He told us that he didn’t like the idea of being judged only the basis of electricity consumption or the idea of environmental “assessors” snooping around his establishment. And finally, he rejected the idea of being in competition with other bars in the area - “it just doesn’t sound like a good way of doing business to me”.

Things weren’t looking good. Uneasy looks were shooting around the table. He had made a lot of good points which seemed to cut right to the heart of the CarrotMob idea. Maybe we’d failed to appreciate just how American this idea was? We’d already received strong criticism that we were encouraging unnecessary consumption, a claim that’s hard to deny when the event revolves around getting people to come out drinking on a Tuesday night. Now a republican was strongly attacking the fundamental ideas behind CarrotMob.

We hadn’t been shown the door yet, though, so we tried hard to praise his past achievements and explain why the competition was necessarily simplistic, allay his fears about energy-efficiency advisors and even suggest that it didn’t need to be a competition if he wasn’t comfortable with that. He seemed to slowly warm to the idea, and eventually started suggesting ways in which we could spend the money – like pedal-powered generators to power the TVs!

Encouraged by our eventual success, we proceeded to an altogether-different venue – the brand new Roadtrip bar. They’d obviously spent a lot of money on the shiny interior but clearly hadn’t given a moment’s thought to energy efficiency. As soon as the manager realised we weren’t intending to simply hire the venue he lost interest and told us to email to make an appointment. We decided that it probably wasn’t worth it. The response in the Bricklayer’s Arms was also to come back later, but was at least accompanied by a friendly smile.

The friendly Irish barmaid in the Barley Mow seemed very keen to find out what CarrotMob was all about and informed us that the pub was run by a couple who lived upstairs. She thought they might be interested, although they were out. Annesley went back the next day to meet the owners and found that they were indeed very keen on the idea, although the pub was part of a chain of 12 pubs and restaurants, so they’d have to ask the chain managers first. We followed-up by email and are waiting to hear back from him.

We were distracted at this point by a drunk guy who interjected and insisted on buying us all drinks while repeating in a loud voice “look guys, I’m not a jerk, I’ve got a PLC!”, as if the two things were mutually exclusive. He proceeded to tell us how he is an ex-commando and that the course of his life had been changed when he sat down for a beer with a Greenpeace activist he’d previously forcibly removed from an oil rig. It was a gripping tale, I really hope it was true.

After we’d drunk up, we went over to Favela Chic and gave a slightly-slurred but very successful explanation to the manager, who quickly understood and seemed keen to participate. Perhaps having a little blood in the alcohol stream had relaxed us a bit and seem less like nervous salesmen!

Cengizhan, the owner of Aquarium, didn’t seem to speak a lot of English, although I’m not sure his permanently bemused expression was entirely due to the language barrier. He seemed to be open to the idea from a commercial perspective, but energy efficiency obviously wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to.

Cocomo is a cosy little retro bar that we’d stand a good chance of completely packing out. The bar manager, Chris, told us that the owners were abroad but that he had “completely free reign” so he wouldn’t necessarily have to agree it with them first. He seemed really positive so we agreed to keep in touch.

Motherbar was completely empty apart from the barman, who was listening to vomit-inducingly cheesy pop music. Annesley phoned the manager the next day, got some interest and followed up by email. I guess they could use some publicity.

I’m not sure why we bothered going into the Electric Showrooms really. The bar is characterised by an enormous sign above the door, lit by a hundred lightbulbs. Something tells me they won’t be switching them to low-energy bulbs no matter how hard we try.

I think the response I got when I pitched to the owner of Jam was the closest to what I was expecting before I started – although he didn’t exactly tell us to get lost, he did use the opportunity to complain about how Hackney council made him pay for recycling collection and how it was pointless to do anything about climate change when China was building a coal-fired power station for every lightbulb we replace. He suggested we go pitch the idea at the monthly pub landlords meeting, but I think it would only take a couple of people like him in the audience to make us cry

Our first and only flat refusal of the night came from the owner of Kick. In no uncertain terms he told us that he was already doing as much for the environment as he wanted to in order to keep his concience clean, and that no amount of our hippie gold would persuade him otherwise. A brief glance around would suggest that his conscience was easily-satisfied.

We got completely the opposite response in The RedChurch. The owner was a real intellectual who obviously thought deeply about environmental issues and was yearning for a way to help. It was really refreshing to talk in depth with him and we got a real feeling that he would do everything he could to support us. He even offered us use of the bar during the day as office space. He also gave us our first firm offer. This wasn’t just mere acceptance or friendly positivity, this was wholehearted commitment to the idea.

We were a bit taken aback by how quickly the owner of Verge understood the idea. He didn’t say a lot, but we could tell he absolutely understood by the way he got straight to the point - “What percentage do I have to offer?”. We told him that he’d have to come up with the figure, and left him to mull it over.

Bar 2012 is owned by a friendly young Asian guy. He understood the idea and although he wasn’t exactly brimming with ideas about how he could spend the money, he seemed to really look forward to the opportunity to learn: both from an energy-efficiency advisor and from environmentally-aware people at the event. He had almost exactly the opposite attitude to the owner of The Foundry, where we had started the evening – he knew he wasn’t doing much for the environment right now, but he was quite happy to take our advice.

We certainly couldn’t have predicted the enormous range of reactions we received, but by listening to the concerns of different business owners, we gradually refined our explanation until we could quickly and successfully communicate the idea. It was an enormously rewarding, albeit slightly exhausting, evening and I’m really happy that we got a handful of very positive responses. The hard part could actually be deciding between them – just going to the highest bidder seems like such a cold, American way of deciding. Environmentalism is much more about having the right attitude and applying that to everything you do than it is about simply investing in energy-efficient appliances. Do we vote with our head or with our heart?

Photos by Annesley

The trouble with Bodder, like many new technologies, is that its true benefits are not immediately apparent, and hence are rather tricky to explain. Another key challenge is that, like other systems that rely on network effects, a social network isn’t much use until a considerable proportion of your friends are using it. Bodder neatly sidesteps this issue by focussing on groups - before you use Bodder to keep track of your friends, you can use it to stay in touch with other members of the same organisations, or to become connected with others who are in the same location or context.

Photo by Simon Hammond

We decided to boil the latter Bodder concept down to its core and ensure that every message had an audience, right from the word go: in exactly 7 days and on a limited budget, we created our own system to allow people to text a message to a large LED ticker display. It’s a fairly well-established concept, but it gets people over the first hurdle - deciding what they want to shout out to the crowd. As soon as they’ve posted a message, they receive a message informing them that they’ve just become the latest member of Bodder, linking them to a page where they can see all of the latest updates from the crowd… and can explore the rest of the Bodder site. Progressively disclosing Bodder’s functionality should make it easier for people to grasp, and increase the likelihood that the hook bites.

Simon wrote a fairly detailed account of how it all went, so I won’t repeat that here, but instead give my interpretation of the results. Although the technology itself worked well, we picked the wrong location to place it in. We chose a prominent, high location that was visible from a large area near the main stage and on a busy route. However, by choosing a position where we were potentially visible to a large number of different people, primarily those who were only passing by briefly, we automatically detached ourselves from any specific audience. This meant that the author of a message had no idea who he was addressing, if anyone, and destroyed any possibility of having a conversation via the screen.

This is probably a good lesson for any internet business to take onboard. On the Internet, it’s tempting to think of your audience as “the world”, but in most cases, you’ll actually attract quite a specific subset, even if the technology is sufficiently generic that it could really be used by anyone. Twitter, for example, is mainly used by the social media crowd, whereas MySpace has long been the home of independent musicians. In a Web 2.0 world, the community is key - not only do you need to know who you’re addressing, your users need to know who they’re addressing too.

This experiment was very successful in teaching us some hard lessons about social dynamics that we could never have learnt sitting at our computers. With these lessons in mind, we’re now planning on taking the same setup to a smaller indoor event where the screen can be visible to the whole crowd. We hope that by making this key change, we’ll get a much better idea of how technology can initiate and support conversations between strangers in the same location. If we can just get them over that first hurdle, who knows what could happen next.

VCA Technology is a young company developing intelligent video analysis software, primarily for OEM manufacturers of CCTV equipment. The OEM then sells to another company that brands the goods, which often go to a regional distributor before being sold to the final customer, often on the advice of a system integrator. Within the customer’s organisation there are different people involved in the purchasing decision, such as the head of security, marketing, finance and senior management. The trouble is, any of these people could potentially land up on the web site, so it was essential to understand the complete supply chain in order to ensure that the concerns of every visitor are addressed and that they find it easy to find the information they require in the language they understand.

Although it took a couple of days of discussions with the CEO, I think this time was well invested as it allowed me to be confident that content I wrote was targeted correctly and that the Information Architecture was appropriate. I enjoyed the challenge of going into a new business, developing an understanding of how their business works, and developing a solution to suit their needs. It was particularly rewarding as I was playing an unfamiliar role and yet still received very positive feedback about the end result.

Perhaps it was a bit unfair to unexpectedly stick a camera in their face and demand some feedback on how I’d done, but I wanted to play with my new toy, so here it is!

What if you have a goal in mind for these conversations, such as to persuade or build rapport? Then there’s an extra challenge - not just to keep the conversation flowing but also to steer it in a particular direction.

Of course, these are skills we’ve all been practising since we were born, but ones that we’re rarely consciously aware of. Although they’re crucially important to our lifelong success, we’re never taught these skills at school. The trouble is, that means that we tend to develop certain bad habits that impede our communication and give people the wrong impression, such as not making enough eye contact or standing with hunched shoulders.  We tend to assume that some people are just generally much better than others at these things.  I think that some people have personality traits that make it come more naturally, but also that with practice, we can learn how to behave so well that it becomes second nature.

I decided to make sure that the way I present myself allows my ideas to shine through, and enrolled on a series of training sessions that covered professional presentation and interpersonal skills.  Through a series of practical exercises, we practised how to present ourselves effectively, both verbally and non-verbally, and how to understand others. We learnt how to stand, sit and speak in order to command respect and make ourselves heard. We looked at how to communicate effectively by understanding which type of person is listening and altering how we present the ideas appropriately. The non-verbal exercises were particularly remarkable, as they demonstrated just how much we can tell about what others are thinking by subtle clues in their body language.

More than anything, I feel this course has made me significantly more self-aware about how I act while talking to people, and empowered me to alter my style to suit the situation. This means that I can be a better manager and team member, who can understand, persuade and motivate more effectively. I am now more confident approaching unfamiliar business and social situations and with selling myself, my ideas and my business.

So that it’s not so empty, I duplicated some of the relevant posts from orangejon.com but from now on, I’ll post work-related things only to this blog, so you might like to follow both if you wish to stalk me effectively.

In my dissertation, I suggested interfaces that group the stories according to the person they relate to, then arrange these people in two dimensions according to:

• their social context (by looking at shared friendships and co-appearance in photos)
• how much interest the user shows in stories about this person (by observing the user’s behaviour)

Here’s a short video I made to show one of these designs:


For more interface designs and details about how they could be implemented, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

In my research, I proposed five categories of friends:

• a close friend whom you see regularly
• a friend who was close but whom you now don’t see or contact regularly
• family
• a new friend whom you see regularly but don’t know much about
• somebody you don’t know well or meet regularly (face-to-face), but publishes good news

Although they seemed like sensible categories, the respondents to my survey only succeeded in categorising an average of 41% of their friends. In retrospect, I was probably rather naïve in assuming that people’s Facebook friends were people they’d with whom they’d had some meaningful relationship at some point in time. In any case, when asked how interested they were in seeing news about each of these categories, there was significantly lower interest in those not covered by these categories, suggesting that I’d not missed out anyone important.

So perhaps these categories have some value in helping people find the news that’s most interesting to them, but they have a key flaw. Not only is it tedious to try to categorise all your friends (the average respondent has 212), but friends will inevitably move between categories.

Facebook takes a different approach - when you add a new friend, they ask instead how you met. This comes back to the idea of friends existing within a social context, something which can actually be quite successfully inferred automatically by simply grouping people according to shared friendships and co-appearance in photographs.

I suggest that there’s probably a link between how much news you’d like to see about a given person and the social context into which those people fit. For instance, you might be quite interested in what your university friends are up to whilst you whilst you’re at university together, but when you graduate you might prefer just to hear about them occasionally - the 21st-century equivalent of the “christmas letter” some of my parents’ friends write.

Trouble is, online social networks such as Facebook don’t do anything useful with this information. Social context is ignored and all your “friends” news is presented you in one big heap. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which the user interface might be re-designed to help you find the news that’s important to you.

For more survey results and discussion of how the social models underlying social networks might be improved, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

I’ve got 167 “friends” on Facebook. According to my research, that’s pretty normal - actually it’s slightly below average. We all know, though, that of those 167 people, only a handful are “friends” according to the old fashioned meaning of the word - people who you enjoy hanging out with, people whose name you remember, etc. It’s true that online social networks are probably flattening social hierarchies somewhat by allowing us to easily maintain some level of contact with a much larger number of people than we would otherwise, but to think that they blow away 10,000 years of sociocultural evolution is hard to believe.

This gross over-simplification of social structure into a binary “friend” or “not friend” has two major implications. Firstly, it has major implications for privacy and impression management - if you added your mum as a “friend” (and it would seem rude not to), she’s just as likely to see those photos of you stupidly drunk at a party as your mates are. Or your boss, for that matter. Real friends tend to exist in a certain contexts - social boundaries that are rarely crossed, and for good reason.

Secondly, the news you’re presented with in the News Feed is flooded with all the latest gossip from the school-friends you added out of curiosity to see what they became. Sure, you could manually construct a friends list with only your closest friends in and only view their updates, but who can be bothered with that? Before they were removed, the feedback buttons and filtering preferences (where you could opt to have more photos, for example) promised to give you some influence over what appears in your News Feed, but my research showed that very few users had even noticed them, let alone used them regularly. There also seemed to be a great deal of uncertainty about what they were supposed to do or if they were actually having an effect.

By grossly oversimplifying relationships, ignoring social context and failing to give the user any way to effectively monitor and filter news from friends, online social networks are missing their golden opportunity to bring people closer to those they care about. In my next blog post, I’ll look at whether this situation can be improved by adding a little more realism to the social model.

For survey and interview results regarding the number of friends people have on Facebook, their level of interest in the News Feed and usage of the filtering facilities, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).

• trust (for both parties): it seems that we are becoming increasingly distrustful of our fellow citizens, and especially of strange-looking people who stand by the roadside. Sharing a car requires a fair amount of trust in your passengers.
• lack of incentive for the driver: a good friend of mine (who is quite active in Christian groups) shocked me somewhat by admitting that when he sees a hitch-hiker, he thinks “get a job and get your own car, you freeloader”. Whilst not everyone is so selfish, many people won’t give up their comfortable solitude without a reason.
• more comfortable alternatives for the passenger: many people in our developed societies are rich in enough to run a car, or at least afford the occasional taxi. Why stand in the rain waiting for some kind soul to take pity on you?

For a regular commute, car-sharing with colleagues doesn’t pose these problems. But for those who work flexi-time, and for all other journeys not covered by good public transport, driving your own car is often the only practical option. The effect is obvious, with UK traffic estimated to grow by 26% on 2000 levels. By that point, congestion is predicted to have grown 65% overall (from 1996) and motorway congestion by a whopping 268%. (source)

But we have the technology to solve these problems and make ad-hoc carsharing a viable alternative to driving solo - especially if you factor in a bit of ecological guilt and fuel price increases.

• trust: as eBay has shown, many people are prepared to make risky financial transactions with complete strangers, so long as they can see the seller’s past history. A similarly simple reputation system could work here, too.
• driver’s incentive: many lone drivers might take trustworthy passengers just for company or to alleviate their eco-guilt, but others could be tempted by a bit of petrol-money. Or if they’re too proud for that, perhaps they could request a donation to their favourite charity instead.
• passenger comfort:no need to wait in the rain, you can be notified by SMS when your ride is approaching.

By integrating transport “offers” from mini-cabs, shared taxis and public transport, a joined-up transport service emerges that could really compete with the car on both price and convenience.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you really have to drive there. Perhaps it’s technically possible to get there on public transport somehow, but it’s hardly convenient. And then when you got there, you could only buy as much as you can carry, making the journey hardly worth the effort. Most people will drive and then fill up with enough food and supplies to last them several weeks. Of course, if your food has to last for such a long time, frozen or tinned is really the only option. As well as being less tasty and lacking in micronutrients compared to fresh alternatives, a significant amount of energy is invested in keeping food frozen from farm to plate.

The biggest advantage of traveling to a big store or retail park is that you can be fairly confident that they’ll have what you want. In a couple of hours, you’ll have filled your freezer and can merrily tick “shopping” off your to-do list. But present-day technology has the power to change that process, giving you fresher food and reducing your carbon footprint.

Imagine that instead of anticipating your needs weeks in advance, you were instead able to browse through a selection of recipes selected by a combination of your tastes, your culinary experience, the contents of your fridge and what’s currently available in your local shops. On your way home, you stop by a couple of smaller stores (guided by your mobile phone), where you pick up your pre-bagged shopping. By ordering in advance, you help the store manage their stock more efficiently. Easy access to real-time information has allowed you to change the way you shop - in a way that’s better for you and for the environment.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how more efficient and flexible logistics can reduce the cost of deliveries of your more exotic culinary requirements and other items, and how better information can make shared transport an attractive choice.

But there’s good news, too: we can solve it. Not just through alternative energy sources and more efficient devices - they will play a big role, but they aren’t the whole solution. We need to change how we live, and go back to what some call the “urban village” - urban lifestyles that don’t involve travelling large distances. At the same time, we can even use this social upheaval as an opportunity to solve some of the problems that plague our modern cities:

• traffic noise
• social isolation
• ineffective transportation
• declining food quality
• throw-away culture

Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing a series of short posts exploring how communications technologies can change the way we travel, shop, work and socialise. I’ll show that in this process, we’ll not only save our planet, but also make our cities nicer and more exciting places to live.

To some extent, they might be right - but at the end of the day, it’s every one of us who makes decisions that dictate what these groups do. Even if it might not feel like it sometimes, they’re all servants of the people and their salary comes out of your pocket every time you purchase something or pay your taxes. Happily, green is fast becoming the new black in some parts of the world and politicians and businesses alike have started battling with each other over their eco-credentials.

The trouble is that most people trust neither what politicians nor multinational corporations tell us, and don’t have the time to figure out whether they are making empty promises or are really making a difference. Occasionally, environmental organisations will expose the worst offenders or produce a ranking for a particular product type. But who goes to the bother of seeking out these reports? I know I don’t.

Perhaps the solution lies in giving consumers a trivially-easy way to check the “green-ness” of the products they are considering purchasing and allow them to make an informed, environmentally-aware purchasing decision. These ratings could be produced by a community process, amongst those concerned enough to spend the time to research and compare several competing manufacturers. The resulting eco-friendliness score could even be embedded into online shops, so that every customer can shop with a clear conscience.

The internet gives us such huge power to easily cross-reference information that few of us now make any significant purchase without checking a few product reviews first. Isn’t it time that we started using that same power to encourage companies to stop bullshitting us and really “go green”?

It’s often said that you learn more from failure than from success, and for sure, this project has taught me a lot. Most fundamentally, it has taught me several important things about myself that perhaps I knew but was trying hard to ignore:

• I prefer to pick a hard problem and spend all day thinking about it than to pick a easier problem and actually solve it. Instead, I should try harder to do something productive without worrying too much about the details or in which order I should complete things.
• I need to work with other people who are less imaginative but more productive. Not just so that I can sit in my chair and bark orders, but that that my team-mates can periodically encourage me to stop dreaming and do something useful for a change.
• Apart from occasional toilet and meal breaks, I really can surf the internet for an infinite period of time. Having regular contact with other humans, especially those that ask you “what have you done today?” helps a lot, but ultimately I need to recognise my knowledge addiction and keep it under control.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that as my team fell apart, so did the project. Although I succeeded in finding some great people with the right skills and a genuine interest in the project, they all had successful businesses of their own as well as full-time study. I knew that it would be a problem from the beginning, but I had hoped that I might be able to persuade them to give me just enough time to make it work. As it turns out, I was being over-optimistic. In retrospect, I should have tried much harder to find team members with time as well as ability, instead of trying to “go it alone” with inevitable consequences.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though - many things have gone surprisingly well:

• Almost everyone I’ve talked to about my ideas have been very helpful, supportive and sometimes even constructively critical
• Being given funding from my University to “be entrepreneurial” was a pleasant surprise!
• Moving to Poland. Not only has it been a lot of fun living here, it’s given me a lot of confidence that I can live a semi-nomadic lifestyle without problems. I mean, if I can live in a country where even “hi” (cześć) is unpronounceable, the deputy education minister thinks that “the theory of evolution is a lie” and government officials are worried about school teachers and even the Teletubbies promoting homosexuality, I can live anywhere

Thanks to everyone who gave me their support and good luck to the IndabaMusic crew - it’d be great to see them grow rapidly and vindicate my ideas! I feel I’ve learnt a lot and am much better equipped to start my next businesses. Watch this space.

With all these noises and flashing lights constantly competing for our attention, it’s no wonder that many people get stressed by technology. So how can we aim to reduce this stress when designing software and devices?

Firstly, don’t ask unless you have to. If the decision is predictable, trivial or reversible, it’s not necessary to trouble the user - just do it and let the user change it if they notice something’s wrong.

If some action does need to be taken, present the message to the user in a non-stressful way. Beeps, pings and flashing lights are necessary when the user must take immediate action to avoid impending disaster - but they are so often misused.

Critically, the notification should be ignorable - not just that it is not so distracting as to completely derail the user’s train of thought, but also that there’s no real penalty to ignoring it. Usually this means that the message must be repeated at an appropriate interval. Of course, the “appropriate interval” is not easy to define and will be affected by the user’s preferences and situation. This is an opportunity for creative UI design and perhaps a little Artificial Intelligence.

Let’s take the example of text messages. When my phone receives an SMS, it vibrates and makes a sound. If I’m in the middle of something, I’ll ignore it. If I’m in the middle of a conversation, I’ll ignore it but the conversation will often be interrupted anyway when the my interlocutor kindly points out that I received a message. The trouble is that by the time I’ve done what I’m doing, I’ve often forgotten I received a message and I only re-discover it some hours later when I happen to use my phone.

How could this type of interaction be redesigned to be more ignorable? First, my phone should know if it’s in my pocket or not - in my case, just detecting if it’s dark would do the trick. If it’s in my pocket, it should only vibrate. If I ignore the message, it should vibrate again every few minutes. If this is distracting, I can give the phone a sharp tap and it won’t bother me again for another 15 minutes. Even if I read the message, I should be able to indicate that I will reply later, in which case it should periodically remind me to do that.

It might seem that having more notifications would increase stress, not reduce it - but I’d argue that by making the notifications gentle and ignorable, the fact that I’m not forced to pay attention significantly reduces their annoyingness.

Designing a product to be ignored is a distinctly unsatisfying goal, but it’s one that I think is becoming increasingly important. To preserve our sanity in an increasingly computerised, networked world, both software and intelligent devices need to be designed to disappear.

This post was inspired by my hob.  In our era of global telecommunications and private space travel, you’d think somebody could design a machine to simmer a pan of water without it boiling over.

So I find it surprising that nobody seems to be pursuing a business model that closely fits this model.  Instead, most people seem to be sticking with some variation of the old-world “make it, box it, sell it” approach, or perhaps a subscription model where all that’s necessary is to keep the customer happy enough that they don’t go elsewhere.  Or, of course, the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) model - give it away and rely on support contracts, goodwill or magic to pay the rent.

Although the FOSS model is the hardest to make money with, it does have a lot of advantages - particularly that you’re much more likely to get free help with development and testing.  In fact, this eager and helpful user community is perfect for providing the constant feedback needed for an Agile development process.  If the user finds a problem with your software or has an idea of how to make it better, they’ll let you know about it - especially if they know it has a good chance of getting fixed.

Unfortunately, therein lies the problem.  With many Open Source projects there are, understandably, relatively few skilled developers that are prepared (or able) to donate large amounts of their time for free - so user’s requests are most likely to go ignored.  As much as they love the idea of FOSS, they’ve got to pay the rent somehow; most likely by sitting in front of a computer at work.  It takes a pretty hardcore geek to come home from a hard day’s programming and want to spend the evening doing the same.  And even if they do, they’ll probably choose to implement a new whizz-bang feature than fix a bug in the User Interface.
I suggest therefore that putting an economic mechanism in place to allow users to financially support the development of Open Source software.  I envisage that it would work something like this:

• a user describes a problem they are experiencing or a way in which they would like to see the software improved, and sets an initial bounty amount, payable upon successful completion
• an expert works with the user to clarify their requirements and to create a series of acceptance tests , and claims some or all of the original bounty
• once the user has agreed that the tests specify their requirements exactly, other users can contribute to the bounty
• developers can then choose a bounty they wish to hunt
• upon successful completion (when all of the tests pass), the developer is paid and the users receive the modified software
• the modifications can, at the discretion of the project community, be incorporated into the normal release of the software, for the benefit of everyone

I suggest that these economic mechanism would not only allow greater development effort, but lead to greater user involvement and, ultimately, better Open Source software.

But armed with an executable definition of your goals, surely the computer could at least have a stab at implementing them? It could simply try running your tests against code libraries such as chunks of existing Open Source software - or, more usefully, try piecing together parts from several different sources in the hope of creating something executable that meets your tests’ assertions. A useful starting point would be to search unit-tested software to find sections of code that satisfy similar unit tests.

It would still require a lot of trial-and-error and hence be quite computationally inefficient, but patterns should begin to emerge quite quickly - which combinations of code satisfy the compiler and which sections of code are most likely to satisfy a given assertion. Of course, it would probably still take a lot of computer-juice, but computers are cheap - you can rent 500 powerful-ish PCs on-demand from Amazon EC2 for as much as the average developer. So if an army of 500 dumb PCs can write half the code, you break even - not to mention the morale benefits of taking all the drudgery out of coding and just leaving the challenging bits for the human to fill in.

I envisage it working something like this:

• design what you want to achieve this iteration, in collaboration with your customer and colleagues
• write the tests and interfaces, preferably with one of your colleagues doing some sanity-checking
• have a nice lunch, whilst your tests and interfaces are sent to the on-demand compute cluster
• come back to find that half the project has been magically coded already
• fill in the blanks, which are likely to be the parts specific to your project or particularly challenging
• whilst you code, the computer could display changes or blocks of code that you can easily include that satisfy the compiler and some of your test suite (although the User Interface obviously needs some thought - we don’t want the programming equivalent of the Office Paperclip!)

This would essentially give a new way of programming - half-way between declarative languages where you only specify the goal and imperative languages where you must specify every step. By specifying the goal and then guiding the computer in creating a solution, we create a hybrid that has the elegance of the former with the power and flexibility of the latter.

Single status… everywhere
In some limited way, we already have status notification built into some software, such as instant messengers, telephones, etc. But realistically, who sets their IM status to offline, their phone to silent, their notice on their door to “Do Not Disturb”, etc. every time they want to get some work done? Usually people either always leave it “online” or “busy” depending on their personality. This lack of accurate status has an effect on the “sender” too, though - they might wait to grab you in the corridor (if you work in the same building, that is) or use something like email, which takes more time and is often a less effective way to communicate.

What we need is two things:

• an easy way to set status
• status “syndication” across all software and devices for that user

I think the ideal way to set the first would be by a program that learns the relationship between user status and easily-collected information such as window titles, key-press frequency, mouse movement, webcam, audio, etc. That might sound all a bit complex, but it shouldn’t be hard to make something that can have a good guess at the difference between me staring wide-eyed at Eclipse while bashing code and sitting back drinking tea whilst I watch YouTube. Then, armed with that information, it should broadcast my status to anyone or anything that wants it.

Pounce!
The way to encourage people to keep their status fresh is to offer them tools for doing useful things with it. One simple one is a “pounce” facility for any real-time communication: when both user’s statuses are set to “available”, alert both of them so that they can talk. It’s something we do so often yet is quite poorly handled at the moment.

Audio To-Do
I don’t know about you, but for every one thing I do, I seem to have at least two or three more ideas of things I’d like to do. Often these are quite simple little things that hardly seem worth writing on my To-Do list. The act of creating a To-Do item would break my flow and also turn my To-Do into a mess. So how about a simple voice recorder where I can hold one key and my recording gets added to the top of a “stack”. I can click to hear the recording (and perhaps see a screenshot and webcam capture to further jog my memory) or to remove it when it’s done. Obviously navigation is an interesting user interface challenge, but the idea is that you generally just pick the next thing from the top of the stack - if you have some reason to put it off until later, you should probably put it on your To-Do list. I have some thoughts about how To-Dos should be organised, but that’s another story.

Rewind button
So the above didn’t work and something has interrupted you, or you’ve lost your train of thought. If you were working in the real world, you’d probably have lots of artifacts to prompt you - bits of paper, tools, materials. But on your computer’s “desktop”, you’ve probably got a huge pile of things that’s relatively hard to glance at and many of which have nothing to do with the job in hand. So how about being able to “re-wind” what you were doing before the phone rang? In a few seconds, you can see which applications you were using and what you were typing - and it probably won’t be long before you’ve found your flow again.

That’s not to suggest that nothing’s been happening in Flukebox land. A little while back, Last.fm’s added two of our key features, downloads and concert listings, to their service. Then one of most enthusiastic and knowledgeable supporters, Andrew Dubber, wrote a blog post that wished our service a “swift and inexpensive failure” - with the smallest of get-out clauses in case I started crying. These, and a few developments from other competitors, made me increasingly worried that perhaps we risked being a small fish in an overcrowded pond. A quick look at some of the biggest Internet success stories in recent years (Amazon, eBay, Skype, etc.) shows that not only did they do something well, they also got established before anyone else had come up with something worth using. So, after a week of feeling decidedly moody and angrily throwing lots of ideas in the bin, I’ve emerged with a new plan.

Flukebox was always a reaction to two technologically-driven trends:

• the reducing cost of digital recording technologies are encouraging more people to record high-quality music
• the Internet is making it practically free to distribute music and is changing patterns and methods of consumption

Just like everybody else, we were focusing mainly on the latter trend and just accepting that the first would provide the raw material for our service. But why? Many musicians make music for the fun of it and don’t really care if anybody hears it or not. A bit like the way I write this blog as a way of getting my thoughts straight and keeping a diary, and am pleasantly surprised when I find somebody has actually read it.

A quick and informal survey reveals that people are mostly just using email and discussion forums to collaborate with other musicians online - if at all. Surely we can do better than that? Making music is different in several important ways - so why do we basically only have tools for doing it on a single computer? Why is there no proper online community for musicians?
Why indeed.

• Skype - I know plenty of people already use Skype to call their long-lost relatives on the other side of the world, but it’s actually pretty good for business, too. Although there are occasional issues with call quality, it’s very useful to be able to send files and web addresses to each other during the conversation. And setting up a conference call is as easy as clicking a few buttons - much easier than trying to figure out how to do that on a normal telephone.
• Google Docs - you might not see the point in struggling with the sometimes slightly awkward interface when you’ve got a perfectly good office suite on your desktop. The real reason to persevere is that Google Docs makes it really easy to work on documents together - even at exactly the same time. For instance, we can keep notes or jot ideas whilst in a Skype conference, and everyone sees what we’ve written. So no arguments about who said they’d do what!
• Gliffy - sadly Gliffy’s updating isn’t so fast, so things can get a bit confusing when more than one person is working on a document at the same time. But it’s still a great way to generate diagrams together.

Of course, none of these technologies cope with the fact that it’s very easy for people to go incommunicado - after all, you won’t bump into them in the corridor. I think remote-controlled electric-shock collars are the best solution…

For technical reasons, the written word has been widespread on the Internet for much longer than any other form of media. Consequently, it would perhaps be fair to assume that is more mature - and perhaps provides some indicator of what is to come with images, sound and video.

The “music like water” makes the same mistake as looking at the Internet and seeing it as a cheap way to distribute newspapers. They’re not wrong - but it hardly describes the trend towards widespread publishing through blogs, forums, personal websites, social networking sites and so on.

I’d argue that we’re starting to see the same thing with music - and in a limited way, YouTube is showing how it can happen with video too. Those predicting that the internet will just make music so cheap that it’s almost free are missing the point and ignoring the real revolution that’s just starting to happen. Again.

This was also posted to the New Music Strategies forum.

Attaching a name (or even better, image) to a Bluetooth ID is also useful, as your phone could provide a useful alert when they are in the vicinity.

Oh, and if somebody from Nokia is reading, I’d love to work for you.

I registered the company at @UK PLC whose basic package, at £23.49 all-in, is actually cheaper than you can do it yourself, and much quicker - electronic filing can only be done using special software or via an agent, and paper forms take around 8 days to be processed. It seems a bit crazy that I can do something as important as incorporating a company without ever signing anything, but I guess signatures are fairly meaningless anyway. Hopefully we’ll be able to conduct the more mundane government interactions over the Internet soon.

Once the registration has gone through, I’ll be able to open a bank account. Abbey offer free business banking (forever), so long as you don’t pay in more than 100 cheques or £3000 of cash or make more than 100 withdrawals per month. I that’s unlikely to ever be a problem for us. Their charges for exceeding those limits aren’t exorbitant, so it would seem like a good deal for most small businesses.

Once I have a bank account, I can apply for VAT registration, which is just a matter of filling in the right form, which looks fairly straightforward. So that was all reasonably easy, now I just have accounting, tax and employment law to get my head around. Joy.

I’m currently reading “Crossing the chasm: marketing and selling technology products to mainstream customers” by Geoffrey Moore. It’s perhaps jumping the gun slightly, as we don’t have any customers yet, let alone mainstream ones, but that’s where my aspirations lie so I figure it’s as well to keep an eye on the horizon, particularly as one of our closest competitors, Last.fm, seems to be stuck in the geek-phase and has yet to acheive mainstream exposure.

Perhaps this is why: it’s a pain to explain. “Well, it’s like this plugin for your media player that logs everything you play and then you can display that on your website and it will recommend artists you might like, and people who like the same things as you and then you can chat to them and listen to the music they like and…”. You get the picture.

Trouble is, Last.fm is probably quite simple compared to our offering. Essentially, it just recommends bands. The challenge that “Crossing the chasm” presents is to state why the idea is better than what people use already, and why we’re better than our competitors - that is, comparing, not just explaining. Oh, and you’ve got two short sentences to do it in.

This is where I will need some help. What services do you use to find music and gigs? What good about them? What’s bad about them? How do you think Flukebox might be better? Yes, I’ve heard it all before a hundred times, but I want to hear it again. Hit me with it.

About a year ago, I came up with some ideas about how various technologies could be combined to support independent artists, in a way that’s never been seen before. Essentially, the combination of:

• peer-to-peer networking, for near zero-cost distribution, made legal by Creative Commons-licensed music
• collaborative filtering-based recommendations, to sift the wheat from the chaff (regardless of the quantity of chaff!)
• online concert listings and e-ticketing for small-venue music events

None of which are particularly novel, but the combination of all three into a single easy desktop music-player application brings significant advantages:

• tracks can be downloaded automatically, based on recommendations
• recommendations can be used for “intelligent shuffle” playback
• music events can be recommended “on the desktop”
• e-ticket booking fees can provide revenue to keep the rest free

I hold the opinion that many internet ventures can, and therefore should, be done on a shoe-string. In keeping with that, I’m moving to Poland, where living is significantly cheaper, thanks in no small part to a beer costing less than €1! I’ll slave away on the code, enlisting the help of friends when I can and experts when I must.

On a more personal level, I see this as a chance to prove whether my dreams are feasible: whether I can survive in a foreign country where I struggle with even the alphabet, whether I can ‘work’ and travel at the same time, and whether I can manage a major project within the toughest of constraints. It might work, it might not, but one thing is for sure: it’s gonna be an interesting ride.