My 3 Best Subscriptions

Businesses of all shapes and sizes have fully embraced the subscription model over the last ten years with a huge swathe of new companies starting up under the subscription business model. I count myself having around 10 subscriptions (with a relatively loose definition), but here’s my top three.

1. The Economist

This is a new subscription for me. I’ve been subscribed to The Economist for only about a month but already I’m extremely impressed with the quality of content. I’ve always followed them online but the limitations of the paywall were always quite annoying so I decided to subscribe.

An Economist subscription gets you the print edition delivered every Friday and of course access to all the online content plus the audio edition and something I find very useful, The Economist Espresso. This is a daily rundown of the most important stories delivered on a separate app - great for a quick read on the morning walk to work.

The full subscription (Print + Digital) costs an initial £12 for 12 weeks and then renews at £53 per quarter which over a year works out at just over £3/week. Alternatively they do yearly subscriptions which get cheaper the more years you subscribe.

All the details are here: https://www.economist.com/subscribe

2. Pact Coffee

The staple of every morning routine, a good cup of coffee. Pact offer a range of really flexible coffee subscriptions depending on frequency, budget and type of brewing you do. The thing I like about Pact is that all their coffee is ethically sourced directly from the farmers meaning they pay much higher rates to the farmers than fair-trade sourced coffee. They also deliver in recyclable packages and their pods are also 100% recyclable. In 2016 they released a transparency report which details all of this and more.

So, with Pact you start off by selecting your package type; Filter, Pods, or Espresso machine, then decaf or ordinary, then the size of the grind which all depends on the method. Then you get to choose your budget. Here they offer three options; House, Select and Micro Lot (see the screenshot below). Finally, choose your frequency, and you’re done. The flexibility and choice is huge.

Each time you get a different coffee delivered to your door with a little sheet explaining where it’s from and the sort of taste to expect - I’ve not had a bad one yet. Of course you can also adjust your subscription at any time and if you run out mid way through you can get your order sent out straight away.

Personally, I have two subscriptions. One is a fine ground for my Aeropress which is great for just one cup at a time, and another is a coarse ground for my Cafetiere - perfect for a few cups.

All the details on their website, and using the code 'JAMES-98790A' gets us both £5 off. :)

3. Charged

Charged is another news subscription but is much more curated than a subscription to a large news site such as The Economist. Charged is all about tech news and is run by a great writer called Owen Williams (you should follow him on Twitter as a minimum). 

With Charged you get a daily briefing (here’s an example) and access to a community (via a forum and Slack channel) which is a great place for discussions. You get all this without any adverts too which is nice. In addition to the paid-for briefings and community access Owen also has a free weekly newsletter and a (sort of) regular Podcast.

The subscription is just 8 EUR per month or 80 EUR for a year.

All the details are on the website char.gd and I think you can use the code ‘bestfriends’ to get 25% off for three months (that code is not affiliated to me at all)

Weather Tech is Thriving

Most don’t know that I’m a weather nerd (now you do), in fact I used to run a mildly successful severe weather site and still run the Twitter account @cardiffstorm. Anyway, when I saw an article on a company using cellular comms to provide high resolution weather forecasts I decided to take a deeper dive in to ‘Weather Tech’ (yes, that’s how I use some of my spare time).

The company I refer to is ClimaCell and it recently raised $15 million in Series A funding. They’re a perfect example of the old ‘Software’s eating the world’. ClimaCell provide ‘hyper-local weather prediction’ primarily by looking at the interfered RF of cellular networks and comparing it to the known signal of different weather types. So, essentially they know what the RF signature is like on a clear day and they know what it’s like when it’s raining at certain rates. Then by using the real-time data they get from the cellular networks they can infer the current conditions on a street-by-street basis. They also combine this data with secondary and tertiary sources such as the more traditional weather radars and weather stations. This allows them to provide these hyper local nowcasts and forecasts just by using existing data and some clever analysis. They claim an accuracy of 90% vs 50% just using radar. These very local nowcast and forecasts can be very valuable to industries such as sports, agriculture, construction and aviation.

Another company that sparked my interest is Spire. Spire has a constellation of 100s of small satellites that it uses to provide weather data among other things such as maritime tracking. It does this in a not too dissimilar way to ClimaCell in that it uses GPS Radio Occulation to gain an understanding of the temperature, pressure, moisture levels etc in the atmosphere by seeing how the RF signals change as they pass through. Spire recently raised $70 million in Series C funding. Back in late 2016 Spire were one of two companies awarded the first ever commercial satellite contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who are probably the worlds biggest meteorological organisation.

The final one that I noticed is a young company called Understory. They have developed a network of weather stations across metropolitan areas in the US such as Kansas and Dallas where severe weather is particularly prevalent. Their weather stations measure a range of factors such as hail intensity, size and angle, wind speed and direction, rainfall, dew point, pressure, among others. They do this every second and upload all the data to Understory via a cellular connection. Their network produces over 50,000 data points every second. According to the company they have one station for every 1 km square. Understory make their money primarily selling this hyperlocal on-the-ground data to insurance companies who can ensure claims are true and accurate and provide proactive communications to customers. However, this data is also very valuable to other industries such as retail and agriculture. Understory last raised $7.5 million in Series A funding in 2016 plus an undisclosed investment in late 2017.

It’s great to see the thing that us Brits talk about the most being given great attention by the startup community and the investors that power them.

3 Technologies to Watch in 2017

I think it would be good to start with a quick review of my three predictions from last year. The first one was Virtual Reality (VR). I think I got this one mostly right as the Playstation VR and Oculus Rift both reached consumers within the year and received extremely good reviews as did some of the Playstation VR games. I say mostly right though as the reach has been pretty limited to those who are well ahead of the curve and to some gimmicky examples mainly for marketing purposes. Although judging by the App Store charts this Christmas VR certainly seemed top of the list with many of the top 20 apps being VR apps.

Secondly was Personal Fitness and Health Tracking. I think this was pretty spot on. We saw a major shift in the wearables market over the last 12 months away from them being a smartphone accessory to being specialised fitness and health tracking devices. There was a clear focus on fitness in Apple’s marketing of the Watch and new Watch 2 in the latter half of the year along with the Watch 2’s new features mostly being around fitness. We also saw the French wearables company, Withings, being purchased by Nokia for 170 Million Euros in a bid to ‘accelerate entry into Digital Health’. Again this Christmas Fitbit was in the Top 5 apps in the App Store.

Finally, I discussed Electric Vehicles although focussed on Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs). This, I think, was mostly right. The Tesla Model X did start shipping but in quite limited numbers. Details of Faraday Future’s offering were not really released in any detail but will be in the upcoming CES 2017. Most vehicle manufacturers released PHEV versions of some of the vehicles and sales of Low Emission Vehicles in the UK increased by 48% compared to last year. There’s still some way to go on this one though. Perhaps I was a year or two early on this one.

So now let’s get in to 2017. We’re starting to get in to a strange stagnant period, almost a ‘no mans land’ between old tech and new tech. Between the Smartphone and the next generation, between human powered tech and AI powered tech. I think 2017 is going to see some hyped up technologies tank - Autonomous Vehicles top my list as the hype fails to materialise in to anything close to the publics and medias (wrong) expectations.

We’re going to see some interesting things happen though as seeds sewn over the last few years begin to grow.

1. Start-up Banks

In Europe, and particularly the UK, there has been a flurry of FinTech (Financial Technology) start-ups raising Venture Capital over the last two or three years. This combined with the relaxation of banking legislation meaning a number of start-ups have been granted banking licenses in the last year means that these start-ups are about to flourish and begin massive growth. Let’s take a look at one of my favourites - Monzo. In the last year they were granted a restricted banking license and according to their roadmap (yes they've released their product roadmap for all to see) they’ll be launching their ‘full bank’ offering within 2017. Earlier this year Monzo reached £20 Million spent through them which although is a drop in the ocean compared to the 100s of billions spent by consumers each year it does show rapid growth. Here’s two infographics showing April 2016 spending and August 2016 spending - the increase is huge and can only continue upwards through 2017.

We’ve also got Atom Bank and Curve growing in the UK while Germany is a hot bed of start-up banks with N26 and solarisBank to name a few services that are growing in popularity.

2. Chat Bots & Virtual Personal Assistants

I put these two together as they use similar technologies, mainly natural language processing and to some extent machine learning (the combination often termed Artificial Intelligence (AI)). Messaging apps have, over the last few years, become a focal point with over 1 billion monthly users each on both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (both owned by Facebook). Since Facebook launched bots on it’s Messenger platform earlier this year the number of bots has grown to beyond 30,000. In China the use of messaging apps as a platform is nothing new, they’ve been using them for shopping, banking, taxis and more for a number of years. With it now becoming immensely easy to develop chat bots companies are beginning to realise their value, particularly in customer relationship management.

Marketing powerhouse Ogilvy & Mathers have recently gone in hard on Chat Bots with them saying “messaging platforms are the new internet, chatbots are it’s websites”. There’s a good presentation here by their Innovation Partner - James Whatley.

Personal Assistants are certainly nothing new. We’ve had Siri and OK Google for years but let’s be honest, they’ve been a bit shit. With recent developments in Natural Language Processing though they’re getting a lot better. Over the last year we’ve also seen the unexpected popularity of the Amazon Echo (Alexa) virtual personal assistant. This was one of the most popular gifts this Christmas and has mostly been sold out since it’s launch.

So now with Chat Bots and Virtual Personal Assistants we’re pretty much there with the voice recognition bar some corner cases so I think this year we’re going to see them becoming a bit more intelligent in their answering of questions and performing tasks - something they’ve been lacking so far.

3. Cellular IoT

An interesting area with huge potential is the infrastructure and services to support the Internet of Things (IoT). I believe that one of the most interesting of these infrastructure items is Cellular IoT, specifically NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT). Through 2016 we saw the 3GPP standard develop and become part of Release 13 (LTE-A Pro).

As I wrote earlier this year there are many IoT specific network technologies such as LoRa and Sigfox that do the job quite well but something they’re potentially lacking is open standardisation, Quality of Service (QoS), and coverage. So SigFox for example is proprietary, it uses unlicensed spectrum so cannot give QoS guarantees, and only has relatively limited coverage (although this is growing significantly).

NB-IoT overcomes these potential issues which for many use cases may prove to be show stoppers.

Vodafone, who are very big in the M2M (Machine-to-Machine) arena are investing heavily in NB-IoT and have spent the last year or two conducting trials and will be opening up the first networks in the latter half of 2017. They also have their eyes set on a number of critical use-cases including autonomous vehicles and drones - both of which need QoS and coverage at least.

Now I have to admit that writing this post was a bit of a struggle. As I said at the top, 2017 is going to be a strange year for a lot of tech as we sit in this odd period between major developments. Let’s see how it pans out.

My Cashless Experiment

£72,000,000,000 - the estimated value of all notes and coins in circulation in the UK. This equates to around 31 billion pieces of metal, paper, and now plastic. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get rid of all of this? Cashless societies or economies have been talked about for many years and some countries are a bit further along the path than others. Just a few weeks ago the Indian Prime Minister urged businesses and citizens to embrace digital payments saying "We can gradually move from a less-cash society to a cashless society.”

One of the leaders in this is Sweden (of course) where only 2% of all payments use cash and over half of bank branches neither accept cash deposits nor give out cash to customers.

To see how far along this path the UK is I thought I’d try a little experiment, I wanted to see how far I could get without using cash for a week. Armed with my Mondo (now Monzo) card I set off. Here’s how it went:

My experiment started on a Sunday with a trip back up to London from Southampton. I needed to get to the train station. I check Uber and there’s no cars available but I know the local taxi company accepts cards, this should be easy. We get to the train station and I asked to pay by card, the driver huffed and groaned. We sat there for a good few minutes while the card machine booted up and I got charged an extra £1 for the pleasure. Not a good start I thought.

I was hoping the rest of the week would go a bit better, particularly as I was now in London, the FinTech capital of the world.

The first test on Monday was a lunchtime trip to a cafe now known between my colleague and I as the ‘crazy Italian’ simply as it’s utter chaos in there (but the food tastes great). Anyway, I order my sandwich and go to pay but of course they don’t accept cards. Luckily my colleague lent me a tenner (which I probably still owe, sorry). Again, not a great start to the week.

Tuesday was a rainy day so it was lunch in the office canteen, unfortunately. Here they do accept cards although there’s a £3.50 minimum spend. Not great I’ll take it.

After just a few days in I wasn’t feeling hopeful. Lunch for Wednesday was at a local bakery which amazingly accepted card payments - YAY!!! The day ended with an evening in Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland. Getting their on the tube was super easy just using contactless at the station barriers but of course nowhere in Winter Wonderland accepted cards - it was a trip to find one of only a few cashpoints on the site.

By Thursday I was really not feeling great (and not because of a hangover) about the experiment. Only twice so far (baguette shop and tube) had I had a nice and easy cashless experience. The day consisted of various meetings around London, travelling via tubes and buses - again super easy with contactless. One of the meetings was in a nice little coffee shop, we order our drinks and then realise they don’t accept cards. Neither of us had cash so we had to go to Pret next door. I was getting really bored of this experiment by now.

Finally, the last day. It was straight to the pub after work where thankfully they welcome card payments. I don’t remember what happened the rest of the evening :)

So what I thought was going to be a nice, interesting experiment turned out to be pretty rubbish. I had high hopes for London’s small businesses. I mean it is 2016 in the financial capital of the world.

I learnt that week that we’ve got a long way to go before the UK becomes a cashless society. Oh well.

The Problem with Trolley Problems

There’s a runaway train barrelling down the tracks. It will kill 5 people, but, there’s a lever you could pull to divert the train and it will then kill only 1 person. What do you do?

This is the trolley problem. Everyone has heard something similar and there are an infinite number of variants. I remember them featuring heavily in high school R.E. and Philosophy lessons as a way to engage the class in debate and to help us easily understand the different philosophical approaches.

Now though they've recently been used by many as a way to ask what an autonomous vehicle would do in a situation where it could, let’s say, either kill a group of pedestrians or kill the vehicle’s passengers. I have a problem with this.

The first issue is that the situations often described are entirely unrealistic. I’ve seen everything from a cyclist pulling out to a group of children suddenly being in the road. When was the last time a group of pedestrians suddenly entered the road right in front of you? I’ve been driving for something like 8 years and it’s certainly never happened to me. Yes, people can step out in to the road but the chances are you’ve seen them on the pavement, perhaps even looking as though they’re about to cross. They certainly don’t appear in the front of your vehicle to the point that an emergency stop isn’t sufficient.

Secondly, we’re saying that a vehicle will have the ‘intelligence’ to make reasoned and complex decisions within a matter of milliseconds but will not have the capability to either a) identify the situation unfolding and take proactive action (e.g. slowing down, pre-engaging brakes, changing lane) or b) take emergency action and very quickly bring the vehicle to a stop or avoid a collision altogether by some other means. In a situation where proactive action could not be taken why would the vehicle do anything but perform an emergency stop just as we do today? Surely if the vehicle has the technology to make complex decisions it will also have the technology to simply avoid a collision altogether (by a combination of reacting quickly and with advanced mechanics and materials i.e. braking systems).

Additionally, there is the issue that there is a huge degree of uncertainty in these situations, even those that are mildly realistic. How can the vehicle ever know how external actors are going to behave? For example, if there is going to be a collision between a vehicle and a cyclist how can the vehicle ever know how the cyclist is going to be behave in such a situation. Let’s say the vehicle makes the decision to put itself in to a wall to avoid hitting the cyclist but the cyclist manages to move out of the way anyway. The vehicle has now potentially injured the passengers for no reason. My point here is that there are far too many variables and unknowns for a vehicle to ever do more than perform an emergency stop or take proactive action if it recognises a potential incident might happen. It is not unreasonable to say that the vehicle will always perform the action with the greatest certainty in the outcome and that will always be protecting itself (and therefore the passengers) as that’s the only thing it has control over and the only thing it knows the behaviour of.

Now I’m not saying I don’t like trolley problems in their entirety, they certainly have their place, as I mentioned at the start but I don’t think that the application of autonomous vehicles is one of them. I will say this though, it has been great that these sorts of debates have and are being had but I don’t see there ever being a decision like this being made by a vehicle.