Tag Archives: London

So… #borisbikes. The future?

Posted on April 3, 2011 | 1 Comment

On Tuesday night I travelled up from Farnborough to a London Java Community event at Skills Matter, which is a fantastic space for the London / Open Source / tech community. My friends and colleagues Simon Maple and (actually now former colleague!) Zoe Slattery were presenting at the event on Enterprise OSGi and Apache Aries, which are increasingly becoming supported in WebSphere Application Server.

(aside: I actually ended up delivering an unplanned/unscripted 5 min lightning talk on MQTT and will post that on my blog if the video appears online)

I’d got to the venue, near the Barbican, via Tube – not an ideal stop to reach from Waterloo, but it worked. On the way back though, Zoe and Simon suggested we take bikes.

Thus, I climbed onto a bicycle for the first time since my second year at university (which more-or-less put me off cycling for a long time, since I was frequently knocked over navigating the Iffley/Cowley roundabout in Oxford, so the plan to cycle between college and student accommodation lasted barely a week). I reckon that’s something like 16 years.

It was actually a really easy ride, and fortunately one of us knew where we were going, so it was all good… and it was mainly downhill. My efforts to repeat the feat the following day (heading from Waterloo to a webOS event in Shoreditch – also a place that’s less easy to reach by Tube) were defeated by heavy luggage, uphill cycling, a poor sense of direction, and a total lack of fitness. I left the bike near Farringdon and took the Tube!

The rental system itself is remarkably smooth, which I appreciated. You need a credit card, there are terminals at every bike rank, and it’s easy to get around London very cheaply. There are “apps for that”, as well, of course, which help you to find the nearest bikes or places to leave them. I was left with a couple of questions – first, how the London cab drivers are “enjoying” the influx of new, inexperienced day cyclists (like myself); and secondly, how practical it would be to carry a cycle helmet in and out of town every day (the signage on the rental terminals do recommend that you “consider wearing a cycle helmet”, and I was certainly wishing I’d been wearing one as I wobbled uncertainly around town).

Overall though, a nice system, and now that I’ve tried it a couple of times, I certainly won’t completely dismiss the idea of riding from place to place in future.

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Some audio from SOMESSO

Posted on May 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

Couple of things:

  • I added a c. 20 min audio commentary to my deck on Slideshare – hopefully it will make the slides a bit more meaningful!
  • Here’s a snippet from Susan Kish’s summary of the day, where she mentions my talk:

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SOMESSO summary

Posted on May 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

The nice folks from AudioBoo caught me for a quick interview after my presentation yesterday and you can hear the short summary of what I talked about on their site, or by playing the embedded audio here.

I was also interviewed on camera by Daniel and Eduardo Vidal (hope you feel better soon, Eduardo!)… and my whole presentation was recorded as well, so those should appear over the next couple of weeks.

Oddly I seemed to spend a lot of time discussing Poken after the talk! I guess my use of Poken as a prop at the start of the presentation raised a lot of interest. My mention of Home Camp and sustainability also generated some additional conversations. I also detected a lot of interest as to how IBM had achieved the cultural changes required to adapt to a social web (answer: I’d argue that openness has been in our corporate DNA for some time now), and also in how we put together our Social Computing Guidelines. Again, I would draw attention to one paragraph in the guidelines which I think sums up the approach and background:

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

I thought the SOMESSO London event was just superb. A series of short (15-20 minute) presentations from some smart people who I was quite frankly honoured to be on the same bill as; and I really didn’t think that there was anything superfluous, it was just great content and information. The Emirates Stadium was a great venue, too… once I’d found my way into the conference centre in the morning, avoiding the queue of contestants lining up for X-Factor auditions! If my camera battery had lasted I would have posted a lot more to Flickr, but I’m afraid there are only a few shots up there.

Thanks to Arjen Strijker, Mary Harrington, Susan Kish and others for putting the day together. On the basis of yesterday’s conference, I highly recommend future events in the series, and would also encourage you to get involved in the SOMESSO community if you are at all interested in social media in the enterprise. I’m really looking forward to following up all of the new connections I made yesterday.

Finally, some links to some of the books I referenced in my talk or during the backchannel conversation:

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Openness and Innovation in a Web 2.0 world

Posted on May 15, 2009 | 4 Comments

Today I have been speaking at the SOMESSO conference in London. I inherited the topic from my friend Luis Suarez… it was billed as “Knowledge management: Security, Intellectual Property and Privacy” but I spun it around a little to look at how exposing your company’s expertise and ideas to the web can actually improve innovation.

I’m completely indebted to Adam Christensen for his words (much retweeted today as something I’d said) about IBM’s approach to social computing, and for allowing me to reuse a couple of slides. I also loved Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post 12 Rules for Bringing Social to your Business, and reused his graphic from there. I thought there were some fantastic synergies with the previous three talks during the morning, and was able to continue some of the threads whilst taking them in a slightly different direction.

For more background on IBM’s approach, I recommend taking a look at an interview with Jon Iwata in which he discusses the loss of control, but the value of social media.

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Home Camp mark 2

Posted on April 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

The second Home Camp event takes place in London tomorrow. I won’t repeat all of the details here, as they are covered over on the Home Camp blog.

We have some wonderful sponsors – CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Onzo, Pachube, and ReactionGrid, with support from theattick who are going to be streaming the event for us as well.

There are some nice pre-event writeups on the Greenmonk and Redmonk blogs.

It’s a shame that due to unforeseen circumstances I’m no longer able to attend, but I’m looking forward to following remotely if I can, and otherwise catching all the content tagged ‘homecamp’ on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter.

The event is open to anyone, so if you are interested in home hacking automation and energy efficiency, you will definitely want to get involved.

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