Status-Q

I like Clayton Christensen. He oughtn’t to be an interesting speaker, by many of the standard metrics: he speaks slowly and haltingly, he stumbles over words, and he uses unexciting slides with little aesthetic appeal. And yet I think he’s brilliant.

This is partly because what he has to say is very important, and partly because he has a wonderfully dry, understated sense of humour which seeps out throughout the talk and can be exceedingly funny.

His talk last month at the Gartner Symposium is particularly good, and you can watch it here. If you’re in business, I recommend curling up on the sofa with your iPad for an hour.

This is a crash course for those who know the term ‘disruptive technology’ but have never heard its originator explain it. It asks questions about how we measure profits. It suggests we are often mistaken in the way we understand customers, and that our competitors may not be who we think they are. It explains milkshakes.

This could have been three or four very boring business talks, and somehow turns out to be one very compelling one. Recommended.

I’m now most of the way through the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, and it’s a great book.

I think it’s entirely fair to compare Steve Jobs to other industrial titans like, say, Henry Ford. Ford, like Jobs, was apparently not a very nice chap much of the time, but what’s unusual about the Isaacson book is to have such a good and frank record, so soon after Jobs’s departure, of the human cost behind his achievements. As Chrisann Brennan, a former girlfriend put it, “He was an enlightened being who was cruel. And that’s a strange combination.”

I can’t help wondering whether Isaacson, in the interest of avoiding hagiography, may have over-emphasized this theme, but it’s hard to tell from outside. (I have a couple of friends who worked with Jobs, but haven’t had a chance to quiz them about it). The book certainly gives the impression, though, of being very well researched, and there’s plenty of it!

If 650-plus pages seems a bit much for you at present, and you don’t feel like plunging, as I did, into 25 hours of audiobook, then I’d recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker, which has an interesting spin on the story.

Many thanks to Hap for the link.

I have a geek-detecting device. It’s a small black battery-powered oblong which dangles from my belt hook, and enables me to discover a great deal about the geekiness of people I meet, often in a remarkably short space of time. But there’s a bit of a story behind it, so let us begin at the beginning…

When I worked at AT&T Lab here in Cambridge, one of the projects involved in-car computers, which we linked to SMS gateways, GPS receivers and a variety of other things. This was long before TomToms hit the local Halfords, and a computer in a car was a fairly unusual thing. We ran software which captured our GPS coordinates every second and saved them to disk, with the result that we started to build up quite an interesting set of data about how fast people actually travelled on a particular road at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, for example. But it was also fun just to have a record of where you’d been. Time, however, moved on – the lab closed down, the project was disbanded, and the computer was stolen from my garage when I was between two cars. Ironically, I never found out where it went…

Well, a few years ago, it occurred to me that at some future point in my life I might find it interesting or useful to have a record of my movements, in the way that I used to have back at the lab. Maybe I hoped that one day Hercule Poirot would turn to me and say, “And where were you, monsieur, on the night of the murder?”, to which I could reply that I was at 52.249 degrees north and at 0.408 degrees east, and would therefore be visible in the footage recorded by the CCTV camera outside Woolworths. Or perhaps it was stories like the one a few years ago about a chap whose speeding ticket was revoked because he successfully argued in court that the GPS tracker in his car, pronouncing him innocent, was rather more accurate than the police’s radar speed trap.

Of course, it’s the things that you can’t predict that often prove to be the most interesting. As Einstein said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research!” And whatever the long-term potential, I realised that if I didn’t capture this data now, I’d never be able to get it back again in future.

And so it was that I purchased an AMOD GPS logger and clipped it to my belt. There are several GPS logging devices on the market but I liked this one because it doesn’t require any special software to read the data – you just plug it into a USB port and it appears as a storage device with plain-text NMEA log files. I have a set of scripts which copy them automatically into a Dropbox folder when I plug it in, and perform some filtering and conversion on the results.

This, then, is my geek-detecting device.

When I tell people that I like to record everywhere I’ve been, just in case I would ever like to look it up in future, some people look puzzled and just say, “Why?”

Some see it as sinister, and ask if I’m not worried about being tracked by the government / the CIA / the boss / the Googleplex / the wife. (It’s actually quite revealing to see which of these first strikes them as a sinister entity. I can’t help wondering if my life would be more exciting if I did have a desire to hide my location from one, or perhaps several, of them…) But I point out that this is not a live tracking system – the mobile phone in their pocket is much better for that. This is about logging data for my own use and it isn’t available to anyone, even me, until I get around to syncing the device to my PC, often several days later.

But then there are others, who get it immediately, and respond with “Cool!” or some similar phrase, at which point I know I have found a kindred spirit. You see, you can take the geek out of the research lab, but you can’t take the research lab out of the geek…

Anyway, all of this means that I can tell you, for example, that exactly three years ago today I had a meeting in London. That’s nothing special – my online diary also records that. But what it doesn’t record is that I took the 10.15 train from Cambridge, via Stevenage, and that it was about 5 minutes late arriving at King’s Cross. Nor that after the meeting we lunched in a little street just off Marylebone Road, and that I arrived back in Cambridge at 15.09. (I had parked at the far end of the station car park). I drove from there to the office, which, because of the time of day, only took 12 minutes, and I finally returned home at 7.38pm. This particular day may not excite you. It didn’t excite me. But it’s still kind of cool to know so much about it…

The main advantage of knowing roughly where I was at any given time, though, has been for my photography. By matching the timestamps from the GPS with those of my photos, I know where each of my shots was taken. I can easily revisit the location of a dramatic view, a comfortable B&B, a cozy restaurant, even if I have no other record of it. I can find all the photos I’ve taken of Ely cathedral, though they were taken on numerous visits. And so forth. This is the main aim of (and market for) these units; many people clip them on when going for a photo shoot or a long hike. But the disregard for sartorial elegance which allows me to wear it every day, combined with a carefully-developed battery-charging regime, means that I almost always have this information for every one of my photos, no matter what the occasion, or which camera I was using.

The system is far from perfect, of course: there are large chunks of many days for which I have no record, because I was inside a substantial building, or forgot to wear the logger, or because its batteries or storage had run out. I decided right at the start that this needed to be something I would clip on and forget, rather than a precise record over which I might fret every day. So I don’t have everything.

But the 92 million data points I’ve captured over the last three and a half years makes for an interesting start…

Some amazingly beautiful footage captured from the International Space Station.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Worth clicking the HD button, and the full-screen one.

Many thanks to John for the link.

I glanced out of my window this morning as the dustmen were going down the street emptying the recycling bins and boxes. One of them was tipping the contents of a big black recycling box into the back of the truck when it slipped from his grasp and followed its contents into the crusher. He shrugged and moved on to the next one.

The moral of the story being… If you find yourself without one, don’t assume your neighbors have pinched it!

I’m gazing up at the exquisitely carved canopy of this four-poster bed, and beyond it at the vaulted ceiling of the Elizabethan manor house in which we’re staying. The adjoining bathroom is about the size of our main bedroom at home.

I think I could get used to this…

It reminds me of Uncle Max in The Sound of Music: “I like rich people. I like the way they live. I like the way I live when I’m with them.”

Sadly, in this particular mansion, we have to hand over our credit card when we check out in the morning….

One of the side effects of getting older is that I have to take some regular daily medication (for some trifling ailments). Another is that I get more forgetful. So I appreciate the tablet packets that come marked with the days of the week.

I do sometimes suspect, though, that the manufacturers think you will take a particular pill because you remember which day of the week it is, and not, as often seems to be the case for me, the other way around…

The whole faster-than-light-neutrino thing is an absolutely wonderful example of the scientific method at work.

How many other fields of endeavour would handle this the same way?

Can you imagine a salesman saying, “We’ve come up with this product, but we’re a bit surprised to discover that it seems to do something we didn’t expect really, really well! Could you check this for us? Is it as good as we think, or have we just screwed up somewhere?” Mmm.

Substitute a politician, or, better, a religious leader: “Gosh! Errm… We think this might be a miracle… Could all of you skeptics out there check the facts for us and see if we’ve missed some rational explanation?”

You get my point…

This is exactly how science is meant to work. I think it’s wonderful, and it makes me proud to be a scientist.

In my studies of transatlantic cultural differences, I have pondered the fact that many successful American companies have been started in garages. HP, Apple, Google… It’s almost a tradition now.

The English, on the other hand, as a naturally modest race, often have more humble beginnings, and the first faltering steps of many companies here are taken in a garden shed. (Though I do have some good friends here who ran their company from a garage for quite some time, and then did very well at getting US investment… Could that have helped? Something to ponder…)

Three of my recent companies – Ndiyo, DisplayLink and Camvine – began life in the shed at the bottom of the garden of a rented house here in Cambridge. The house was used for meetings, for management, for coffee-preparation, but it was the shed where the important stuff happened. Though, to be fair, it was a very fine shed, with four desks, Velux windows and views of the college playing fields next door; it would be fairer, perhaps, to call it a studio.

About 18 months ago, Rose and I built a new shed at the bottom of our own garden. (No Velux windows in this one, though it does have three runs of Cat-5 cable going to it from the house.) We built it mostly just because we needed the space, but some friends saw this as heralding something more significant. You now how, in a movie, when a female character is suddenly sick for no apparent reason, you can tell it won’t be long before you discover she’s going to have a baby? That kind of thing.

Well, as it happens, I do have a project which I’ve been wanting to work on for some years, but haven’t had the chance. I’m not sure whether the technology is really viable, and I can’t talk about it publicly yet because if I can make it work, I may need to write some patents. But I think it’s worth trying.

And so this past week was my last full-time week at Camvine, though I’ll be doing some part-time work for them for a while to help smooth the transition, and maintaining close contact with the company whenever I can. It’s a great team, and they have my strong support and best wishes going forward.

First, I’m then going to take a couple of weeks just to potter about a bit. Other than visits to the in-laws, I think I’ve only had one holiday since I started Camvine four and half years ago, so a short break will be welcome.

But last week also marked the incorporation of my new company, Telemarq Ltd. Sounds good, eh? You know and I know, dear reader, that it means ‘Quentin trying to make new stuff work, while propping up his rapidly dwindling savings with some consulting’. But please don’t tell too many people!

You can tell them, however, that the Telemarq headquarters are in a shed.