You’ve seen it. The red eyes… An ennui for life… The drained sadness of someone who has been lost for weeks in a customer support ticket tracking system. At mySociety (the awesome Internet democracy charity I was on the founding team of) we tried using Request Tracker for a while, and quickly fled. We could flee, because we […]

Many British geeks (including me, once) have an instinctive distaste for marketing. This is wrong – it lets the evil people get all the advantages of marketing. It hides really good and useful products and services from people. Instead we need a morality to distinguish the good from the bad. The only definition that I’ve come […]

Because I work in technology, people are often surprised that I spend 2 weeks a year living in the 16th Century. The first episode of a new Podcast by Jonathan Deamer and I explains why. What is Kentwell Hall? Were the Tudors a high technology society? What does it mean to be human? Why do both Jonathan and […]

There’s not enough awesomeness in the universe. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a lot. But we could do with a bit more. That’s why we’re lucky that Tim Hwang set up the Awesome Foundation a few years ago. It began in Boston, and has spread to dozens of cities. How’s it work? 10 trustees […]

It’s as if your best friend had suddenly died and nobody would tell you how. Heart attack? Car crash? Murder? This time the afflicted isn’t a person, but a startup called WhipCar. The idea of WhipCar… Rent your car out for the odd day or weekend to your neighbour to cover its vast cost. Or, if […]

Earlier this year, giants came to Liverpool. I was rapt. Addicted. Each day I woke my girlfriend early. A morning taxi to see a giant diver wake up near two football stadiums. Forced rushing after a night’s drinking to see what a little giant girl would do next. If you just saw the pictures, the […]

Imagine a vast multi-dimensional space. Each point of it represents a specific need that a specific person has, an iota of utility. The dimensions represent crazy things… Is the need in Africa or in Europe? Is the need on a LAN or on the web? Can travel to satisfaction of the need be done by […]

I decided to investigate Heroku’s early years. You can learn a lot from even quite recent tech history (see my previous article on version control). My tool? The Internet Archive. It’s an elephant that never forgets your pivots. 1. November 2007 – code in the cloud Ruby on Rails is riding high. But impossibly hard to deploy. […]

At mySociety‘s annual retreat I gave a lightning talk about how I’ve come to realise that products and markets are the same thing. I’d originally intended it to be a blog post, so here you are. It’s a story of geeks learning. What is a product? It really is magic. Before the invention of products (whatever that […]

Today’s audio blog is about the excellent DoESLiverpool, and why you should be their friend too. listen to ‘Do epic shit’ on Audioboo Being a friend (who does epic shit) of DoESLiverpool costs £9 a month. So far the perks are, on the surface, imperceptibly different from those that anyone can get – excellent events, free hotdesking if […]