Author Archives: Chris

Ways to make money around open data

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Over the last few months, I've been thinking about open data, partly at where I used to work in my old job, and in my own time.

The field is currently very young, so I thought it worth sharing some examples that I’ve found particularly interesting.

Four ways of making money around open data

Selling access based on timeliness

In some industries, timeliness is the difference between making a decision that makes millions, or one that gets you fired. Bloomberg have made a lot of money from selling the same data they make available publicly, available a few milliseconds earlier to paying customers on trading desks, and across newswires.

In the open data world, the musicbrainz database, used by the BBC for its programming, and its live data feed product is a good example of the same open data being sold on timeliness, rather than content.

Selling more detailed versions of the data

Elsewhere, giving away data, to sell access to more detailed data is common, and a tried and tested approach, used when selling business information.

While this is hardly new, one of the most interesting examples would be Duedil - you can retrieve a wealth of information on their public website, (the kind you’d easily pay hundreds, if not thousands of pounds for access to), but sell premium services for further data, beyond what is available on their pages, and for certain kinds of API access.

Letting people pay to go private

In some cases you might want take openly licensed data, and either build upon it, or incorporate it into an existing body of info, to give your business an edge over competitors.

In this case, you’d license the data under different terms - this approach is often called the dual licensing approach, and is common in the software industry. Oracle and 10Gen both take this approach, licensing versions of some their respective products, MySQL, MongoDB differently.

In the world of open data, Open Corporates is another good example; you’re free to use their data, as long as you share it under the same terms, and credit them as the source. If you want to use their database without sharing the changes back (say, in a product you’re building that uses the data that you want to charge), the same data is available under different terms.

Selling services around the data

Another common use of this would be providing services that tailor how existing data is presented, to provide specific insight more quickly, more cheaply, or in ways simply not possible for a customer to access themselves.

UK startup GrowthIntel do this, using a combination of open data from the UK government, and screen scraped content to build proprietary business intelligence products.

Another good example of turning open data into money like this would be the work done by the [Prescribing Analytics][12] project for the NHS.

A group of doctors and technologists took anonymised, open data provided by the NHS, about which drugs were prescribed each year around the UK, processing it to find patterns in how the NHS buys drugs.

Among other findings, they found patterns where branded drugs, costing 10 times as much as generic, off-patent equivalents, were routinely being prescribed, for the same therapeutic benefit to patients.

So far, this has uncovered potential savings of around [£200million in 2013, just when looking at single drug so far][13].

Summary

Hopefully, I've shown that while open data is an interesting idea, it's not so new and different that all existing knowledge about how to run a business around information ceases to apply.

UX Thursdays #1 – Nudging people away from landfill at the London Olympics

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When I refer to UX, I'm referring a human-centred process of either designing products, or services that has somewhat fuzzy edges with other disciplines like service design, and I'm including examples that occur in the built environment as well as just onscreen.1

Nudging people away from landfill

One such example is the smart move to nudge people away from landfill at the London Olympics, captured by Richard Pope last summer here:

making the landfill bins shorter than recycling ones at Olympics

It's not a huge intervention, but making it slightly more awkward to condemn otherwise recyclable waste to a fate in landfill somewhere, is a lovely touch - the implicit communication here acts as a elegant trigger for the question:

Could what I'm about to throw away be recycled instead??

That said, I'd love to know if there was any data about if it affected recycling rates, beyond just looking like a clever idea.

As an aside, you could do a lot worse than follow what Richard Pope is up to: in addition to being one of Govuk's first hires, he also has a habit of making lovely little things, the most recent being his Bicycle Barometer.

Which seems like a fine candidate for a future UX Thursdays post - that's all for now, hope you enjoyed it!

 

 

  1. I may be on safer ground referring to this as design thinking, but UX Thursdays, sounds so much snappier. ↩

Introducing UX Thursdays

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For the last few years, I've been keeping a scrapbook where I screenshot or take photos of clever little design ideas, either online, in products, or in the built environment, that either gracefully guide behaviour in a particular direction, or otherwise represent some noteworthy example of considered interaction design.

Sharing one, each week

They'd be more useful shared online than just on my 'pooter, and this blog seems a good a place as any other.

So, every Thursday, for as long as I can keep it up, I'll be posting something from my scrapbook onto this blog for your perusal, dear reader.

Let's see if this works.

 

 

When the cloud is like a box of apples

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Last week, I gave a talk at LDNdevops, about the steps that you can take as a devops engineer to make your cloud computing more planet friendly, and while I was there, watching Sam Pointer's talk about using Chef to manage thousands of virtual machines, I learn of an interesting side effect of Amazon providing abstract virtual machines through its compute cloud AWS, rather than selling actual servers.

When you have a box of apples, some are going to be bad

Back when I used to work at Headshift, I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine, Stu Calum telling me how he had heard AWS being described as something like create of apples - Individually they're fine, but every once in a while you come across a bad apple1.

So whenever you're working out how you might build out infrastructure, you need to expect that one or more nodes will be will blink out of existence with little or no warning, on a more regular basis than that provided by more traditional colocation, or virtual private servers.

Not so much bad apples, as good, great, okay, bad and terrible apples

One thing that that really leapt out at me was how Sam in his talk mentioned how they use Chef to provide an audit of the 'quality' of their machines by benchmarking how well the difference virtual machine instances they have compare to the baseline in a graphical fashion.

They do this because while we as customers are buying "large", "small", "medium" and "extra large" virtual machines, we have no real idea what the actual hardware they run really is, or where the metal lies in a typical server lifecycle. So on one day you could be spinning up a load of aging servers, that are being sold as "medium" VM instances but are much slower than normal, but another day you might luck out and spin up some virtual machines running on superfast, shiny new hardware, giving you loads of free performance.

This graph they use helps them visualise the relative performance of the machines they're using, by comparing the area underneath the graph:

bang_for_buck

In a given corner if the area is large, they have a load of fast machines, and they're better off holding on to them. If the corner is smaller, it may be worth switching those VMs off, and spinning up some new ones to do the same job the old ones were doing, in the hope that they give more bang for their buck.

There's more available in this published paper on USENIX here, and if you find this interesting, you'd do well to follow Sam Pointer's blog - it's full of little gems like this.

  1. To give full credit, I think this description came from Stephen Nelson Smith of Atalanta Systems, ↩

Ted Nyman on remote working

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I found out today, that Ted Nyman, @tnm on twitter will be speaking at the coming Monkigras conference later in January/Feb.

Having never heard of him before, I googled him and came across a great post about the cultural benefits to a company of providing for remote workers, but also how important it is to go all in if you do decide to go down the remote worker route:

So look beyond. GitHub employs Midwestern homeowners, Texans with gardens, European urbanites, climbers in the Pacific Northwest, British guitar players. We've even allowed in several Australians. This helps temper the worst cultural excesses and business cul-de-sacs rampant in Social Hybrid Cloud Web 3.0. It broadens our vision. It reduces local bubble think. In short, geographic diversity helps keep the organization grounded in reality.

The effectiveness of remote work, and the extent to which it can help your culture, depends on how much a company encourages it. If you're going to do remote, you must do it all the way.

Consider job postings. "Remote work possible for the right candidate" is awful. "Work where you want" should be the message.

A company can't just begrudgingly accept the possibility of remote work. It must embrace it.

I'm now quite glad I bought that ticket - he sounds like a smart chap.

Trying out Sketch App

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Over the last 6 months, I've been spending less and less time at work coding in sprints, and more time learning techniques more associated with product management, like running user testing, creating wireframes, writing user stories.

I've also been making mockups with Pixelmator and LittleSnapper too, which I've found quite nice to use together to snap a page, clone the elements, and experiment with layouts quickly, then export a png, to attach to a card in Trello.

I generally don't pay too much attention to building meticulously organised hierarchies of reusable layers when working with an image editor - this approach is partly based around Jason Zimdar's Work in photoshop, don't save in Photoshop post.

 Trying out Sketch

However, for building something new from the ground up, rather than shifting existing elements around, I've preferred using vector art apps, like Illustrator on previous projects.

However, I haven't been able to find a cheap OS X alternative to Illustrator that I got on with, and I was pretty much about to give up when last week in the Sidebar email newsletter, a new app, Sketch was mentioned as being available for just over 20 quid. I took it for a spin, liked it enough to buy it.

To learn how to use it, I tried making a few app icons for a Site Specific Browser for 750 Words, a writing site I use when I have time.

Now I need to stress, I am no icon designer - this is mainly me dicking about with new design tool, to see how it works. But getting these made was reassuringly straightforward, and making something that looks slightly nicer than the default upsampled favicon was a fairly quick process:

Original upsampled favicon

original ssb favicon

Higher res take on the original icon

three papers

I made a couple of alternative icons too, largely because I was starting to enjoy myself using the app, and wanted to see how shadows, gradients, and what typographic control was available:

green box white tick

white box green tick

On the whole, I'm finding it a really nice tool to use so far.

I'll see how I get on using it for building a site over the Christmas break, and after I've put some actual use into it, if I have anything worth sharing, I think I'll put together a proper writeup on it.

the smallest, quickest thing you can do to test a vision

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I came across a lovely post by Bruce Durling, a friend I met through my various cleanweb escapades over the last year and a bit.

For me, the problem with waterfall is that we end up waiting far too long to see if our original vision or strategy was worth pursuing.

Agile is all about figuring out the smallest, quickest thing you can do to test a vision. And if the vision is right, then that thing should start to return some value to the business. If the vision was wrong, then it tells us that we need to change the vision.

I find this a really nice way to think about Agile as a tool for managing projects.

How are you supposed to exercise when your wrist is in a cast?

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Silly question time.

I have a cast on my left wrist from crashing my bike. It looks a lot like this:

7661144_WqPVWg3ifcQYHNgnx1n8xiF9D6y7nPwP_5xuAh_yNsI

I shouldn't get it wet, and I have to shower with it in some comical arm-condom contraption from Limbo.

I also miss exercise massively, but the idea of exercising and therefore sweating into a cast that can't wash for weeks doesn't exactly sound attractive.

What are you supposed to do if you want to stay active and retain some fitness over the 6+ weeks you're in plaster?

Coming across the TACT model for midata

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A few weeks back, I went to the Midata hackday hosted at the ODI - my first hackday in a good few months.

As you might have gained from the title, the focus of the hackday was midata, a term commonly used to describe the shift of stewardship over personal data from other organisations, to the individual whom the data is about, where they have control over how it is used, or whom it is shared with.

The implications of this aren't always easy to grasp when you first hear about midata, so after trying to explain this to friends and family a few times, I've settled on asking this question of people to help explain why ownership and control of your data is important:

How might you change your behaviour if you had access to the same kind of insight about your shopping patterns, and diet as Tesco or Visa have?

While this tends to work as a trigger for thought, once you're thinking about the subject, it helps to have a model to help guide these these thoughts.

The TACT model

It's at this point that it's worth mentioning the TACT model, which William Heath of MyDex and the Open Rights Group introduced to me at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki.

I've found it a quite useful tool, because it gives four distinct areas to look at when thinking about your interactions with third parties that hold data about you.

  • T for Transparency - I know and understand what data an organisation holds about me and what this data is used for
  • A for Access - it's easy for me to see the details of this data
  • C for Control - it's easy for me to set and change permissions, update and correct relevant fields etc
  • T for Transfer - the actual release of this data (initially, transaction/consumption) data back to them in a portable electronic form is possible.

As you'd expect when we apply TACT to Tesco, we see a long route ahead of us of course, but it's early days yet, and there's increasing interest in this area. Which is a definitely the subject for another blog post.

Divestment from fossil fuels as a campaigning issue

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Inspiring story about students campaigning for divestment from fossil fuels, the same way students from a few years earlier campaigned on divestment in South Africa.

> SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

> Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.